I’ve upgraded my blog because there just isn’t any way to make sure that my JavaScript Animated Collapsing Categories Widget will work the way I intended to make it work. Well, by and large, things are great. I love the faster posting, better GUI editor, autosave, and lots more. . .
But the darned Link Categories are killing me. I was under the impression that the plugin I made worked, and certainly, it does not crash. Nevertheless, there are a few vexing issues that have cropped up with the new Category regimen.
Here’s the deal: if you install WP2.1 fresh, as I did with my wife’s blog, it will create a “Blogroll” Category for you. All Link Categories you create after that will have the “Blogroll” Category as their parent.
However, if you *upgrade* from WP2.0+, it does not create this “Blogroll” Category. It *does* create the sub-categories, but they all appear as children of the “Uncategorized” Category. At least, it does not create the top level Category if you, like me, do not have anything in your top-level “Blogroll” and have everything in sub-categories.
I discovered this problem when I noticed that Blogroll categories were showing up in my list. I’d tied the conditional that checks for Blogroll Categories to the cat_ID that is used in a cleanly-installed WP, which was dumb, but then I realized that no condition that relies on a “Blogroll” Category will work. This makes life very difficult for me in terms of my plugin.
The only other option I can think of is to check to see if a given Category includes any links. There is a “link_count” column in the database which could be used. However, if a person chooses to create a Category but not put anything in it right away, that person won’t see the Category. I suppose that this is not the most world-shattering problem I’ve ever run into, but certainly it’s a potential pitfall for those using my plugin.
The thing is this: I still consider this a design flaw. Regardless of whether or not there are any items in the Blogroll proper, in order to make a rational relationship between Links and Categories, this Category must exist. Also, to make the Link Categories children of the Uncategorized Category defeats the whole purpose of the new switch.
WordPress 2.1 Gotchas » Technology, Blogging and New Media
After my upgrade, my blogroll is all screwy.
I mentioned in my 10 Things article that there were semantic reasons for the combination (at least on the back end) of categories and what was formerly knows as “Links”. You’ll notice that Links is now called Bookmarks and is actually a category to itself among the Category listing.
Since my upgrade, it seems blogroll items appear in multiple categories.
There is a bug in 2.1 that is not serious in terms of security but can do strange things with blogroll links. Namely, upgrading from a 2.0.x blog can result in some blogroll items being added to other categories. This can be manually fixed and no data is lost, but it is an annoyance. [Trac 3418]
Technorati Tags: WordPress, 2.1, Categories, Blogroll
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