Syntagma Digital
Editor, John Evans

Wordpress 2.1 — Bulk Link Categories

Update : Aaron Brazell of Wordpress fame has addressed this question over on his Technosailor blog. You can find his thoughts here.

In Wordpress 2.0.x there was a simple facility to bulk change the link categories for numbers of links. Unless I’m mistaken, that appears to have been dropped from 2.1.x.

I’ve just imported 52 links to what’s now called the Blogroll (it used to be “Links”) and have had to add the link category individually to each one. To say that’s time-consuming is an understatement, especially if you have lots of sites to do.

In earlier versions of WP, you could set the link category default then import links, using AdminMySQL on the server, and they would automatically slot into the default.

In 2.0.x, this didn’t happen, but you could switch the whole lot to the same category with a couple of clicks.

Now, even that’s disappeared, and a pre-industrial, “by hand” method is all that’s left.

Am I missing something here? Anyone know?

8 Responses to “Wordpress 2.1 — Bulk Link Categories”

  1. I’m not really sure what you are talking about. But, on all of my upgrades to 2.1 I had to change the LINKS page … to use this code instead

    (I’m posting some code .. if the below is blank .. email me)

    On some of them, where have different sections of links, I had to change the Link number from , e.g. 1 for the first one, to e.g. say 32 if I had 31 categories previously.

    cat_id=32); ?>

  2. erm… let me try that once more .. without code..

    I switched to this:

    wp_list_bookmarks();

    or this .. (check manage categories for link category number)

    wp_get_links($link_cat->cat_id=32);

  3. Thanks, HART. I think the code problem was covered by Thord in the new designs which are optimized for 2.1.

    The problem is, there’s no facility for bulk adding a category in 2.1 as there used to be in 2.0.

  4. John-

    You asked me to address this in my WordPress FAQ series and I plan to, but one thing I have to point at is the fact that WordPress 2.0.x did not have link categories. You’re thinking about post categories as a whole, which priot to 2.1 only applied to posts - and nothing else. With WP 2.1, we got link categories too which were all managed via the same categories table in MySQL. So, if you were able to assign categories to links before you must have had a plugin installed or something.

    I’ll give a more detailed response and an answer to the how-to question on Technosailor.

  5. I had noticed that the link cats were bundled with the post cats in 2.1, but assumed that they worked the same.

  6. [...] question comes from John Evans who outlined the problem is greater details over at [...]

  7. Here’s my best stab at an answer. Hope it helps.

  8. Thanks, Aaron. Good to know it will be fixed, maybe in 2.2.1. I’ll definitely wait to upgrade until then. :-)

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