Folks, I have today committed some changes to WordPress’ Link Manager, here are some of the highlights:
* You now configure the display of links on a per category basis in the administration screens.
* You no longer need 25 parameters per function call to define how you display them! Hurray 🙂
* You can now define text to prepend and/or append to your links if they have been recently updated.
* You can, of course, define recently.
* I’m about to check in a new tab of settings for the Options page which will include the above settings and everything from links.config.php.
* The help pages have been updated.
There were also some earlier changes to Link Manager:
* There is now a notes field to a link. This is a MEDIUMTEXT column so it can hold quite a lot (16MB) and is intended to hold, for example, a review of the site to which the link points.
* In order to get at the now large number of pieces of data associated with a link and be able to lay them out and format them in a flexible manner (before, after, and between no longer cut the mustard for anything but the simplest use), I have added get_linkobjects(), and get_linkobjectsbyname() functions.
* I have also added the ability to change ownership of links too. This should get round the fact that the initial links on a brand new WordPress blog, are created with admin as owner. When a new user is created and logged in, that user could not even see those links in the link manager. Now as the new user they can at least see those links, and when they login as admin, they can assign ownership of the initial links to their new user.
* There are also some other actions you can perform to links en masseas well as assign ownership; that is toggle visibility and change category
* The install and update scripts have been amended for all these changes.
* If you have already run the update script you only need to run step 1 again.