It seems several things have caused various levels of consternation as people have upgraded their blogs to WordPress 2.1.

My main issue involved the use of wp_get_links.

In WordPress 2.1, there are significant changes to the way the Link Manager works:

  1. Any link management is now done through the Blogroll tab.
  2. ALL link categories are now kept in the same table as your blog categories
  3. Essentially, in WordPress 2.1 a category can have both posts and links.
  4. If you upgraded from a previous version, your link category ID’s will changed. If you used wp_get_links to dynamically populated various link lists and they are now empty, chances are the category id wp_get_links was pointing to either no longer exits or, because of the changes, does not have any links associated with it.
  5. Even changing your old wp_get_links commands to the right categories may not fix your problem. For some reason, the default behavior of wp_get_links no longer places <li> tags around each link.
  6. The replacement for wp_get_links seems to be wp_list_bookmarks
  7. wp_list_bookmarks is indeed more powerful – there are a lot more parameters to choose from
  8. Find out how to use wp_list_bookmarks
  9. Note: there are inaccuracies in the codex for wp_list_bookmarks. For example, you MUST enclose the whole string within the parenthese with single ticks: wp_list_bookmarks(‘all my parameters here’)
  10. Not every parameter seems to work. I am still trying to verify some issues. For example, wp_list_bookmarks includes the name of the category by default. This can be changed or turned off with the parameter title_li. However, I have been unable to get it to work. I will update this post if I find out the reason.

As way of example, here is how I am using wp_list_bookmarks to call a menu on my site:

<ul>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_before=&title_after=&
categorize=1&category=52'); ?>
</ul>

This code produces this:

The nulls for title_before and title_after remove the default <h2> tag that occurs before and after the category title.

categorize=1 ensures the category name is display. If set to zero, the generic “Bookmarks” appears.

category=52 grabs the links associated with that category.

Like I mentioned above, I am still trying to figure out how the title_li parameter works.

If you have any questions please leave them below.

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About the Author

Paul Flyer loves to research the web and find resources and tools for building, maintaining and promoting websites. Based in Saint Louis, MO, he works in management and spends his free time sharpening his web development and copy writing skills. Feel free to contact Paul with any questions, comments or ideas. He is also available to help you with your own website.

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