Design, Coding, SEO and Social Media Marketing, WordPress & Facebook

NOTE: “My Link Order” requires a patch to work correctly in WordPress 2.8. Read this post…

After experiencing a fair amount of frustration trying to order the blogroll links on our Social Media Resources website which is built on WordPress, I googled around and found My Link Order. This plugin really does the trick, and plays nice with WordPress v. 2.7.1. But it requires a patch to work in WordPress v. 2.8.

If your theme uses widgets, they suggest that you replace the standard “Links” widget with the “My Link Order” widget. I found it doesn’t work if your theme uses widgets and you don’t use the “My Link Order” widget.

However, the theme our Social Media blog uses is “Modern,” designed by Ulf Pettersson, which doesn’t use widgets, and the My Link Order developer’s instructions form using their plugin with a non-widget theme aren’t accurate.

You need to do two things:

1) Make “/wp-includes/taxonomy.php” writeable (permissions: 666)

2) In “sidebar.php” replace the PHP code for pulling in the links with this code:
<?php wp_list_bookmarks(‘orderby=order&category_orderby=order’); ?>

Once you have installed the plugin and made the above modifications, ordering your blogroll links and categories is a piece of cake — just drag and drop them into the order in which you wish them to appear.

I find it odd that this feature isn’t built into WordPress. Without the My Link Order plugin, ordering the links is very limited.