Blogroll Links Plugin

For people who maintain their Web site or blog using the WordPress blog content management system,
blogroll-links is an open source WordPress plugin that uses WordPress’ built-in Blogroll feature and presents links to friends’ home pages and own pages on social networking sites using XFN in the links.

Features of this plugin

• It can show the links by category in blog posts and WordPress Pages.
• It uses WordPress’ standard built-in Blogroll links database. There is no hassle of another list of links to maintain.
• It can be used to show only the links assigned to a particular category, by stating the category slug as defined in that category’s setting in WordPress.
• It honors the Show/Hidden setting as defined for each link in WordPress.
• It displays the link in the same window or new window, as specified for each link in WordPress.

To learn more about this plugin, please read my blog post about it titled
Social Graphs API: WordPress Plugin: Blogroll Links

Examples

See this plugin in action at the following Posts and Pages powered by WordPress:

www.rajiv.com/friends/

The two lists, first one of links to my own pages on various social networking sites and the second one of links to some of my friends’ pages are generated by this plugin. Yes, those social networks’ logo pictures are also taken by the plugin from the WordPress standard Blogroll links. Code:

<h3>My Pages on Social Networking Sites</h3> 

Syntax:

[blogroll-links categoryslug="rajiv-web" sortby="link_name" sortorder="desc"] 

Old syntax for legacy support:

<h3>Web Sites of Some People I Know</h3> 

Syntax:

[blogroll-links categoryslug="people" sortby="link_name" sortorder="desc"] 

www.rajiv.com/charity/

This list of charitable organizations with brief descriptions is generated by the plugin. Code:

Syntax:

[blogroll-links categoryslug="charity"] 

www.rajiv.com/blog/2004/08/02/search-engines/

This list of search engines is maintained as Blogroll links in WordPress. Code:

Syntax:

[blogroll-links categoryslug="search-engines"] 

www.rajiv.com/

The featured links shown under the “What’s featured here?” section shows the links I’ve categorized as featured in WordPress’ Blogroll links. Code:

<a title="featured" name="featured"></a> <h2>What's featured here?</h2> 

Syntax:

[blogroll-links categoryslug="featured" sortby="link_name" sortorder="desc"] 

Thanks to Dave Grega, Adam E. Falk (xenograg) for their contributions to this code.

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.

1. Download the .zip file of blogroll-links from the WordPress plugins directory.
2. Unzip it into the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

1. 

   This screen shot shows the plugin displaying links to my pages on social networking sites. What's not shown, but would show in the HTML source of that page are the rel='me' and other tags that denote the XFN relationships between my pages.

Why do I need this plugin? WordPress can display blogroll links in the sides on its own.

This plugin extends WordPress’ blogroll links functionality by building on it, not replacing it.
It enables you to show the links within the content of your WordPress Posts and WordPress Pages.
It takes full advantage of the WordPress blogroll links database and management tool.

Besides social networking links, where else could this plugin be useful?

For other lists of URLs in your blog post. You can keep that list of links fresh without going back to edit your post.