Link Manager aka Blogrolls to be “Sort of” Removed in WordPress 3.5

About a year ago, we wrote an opinion post here at WPBeginner with the title “Should Blogroll ‘Links’ be removed in favor of WordPress menus?“. We got a decent feedback in the comments and our social media channels (twitter and facebook). Recently while browsing through the upcoming features in WordPress 3.5, we noticed ticket #21307 which is to remove link manager from core.

So why did we title it sort of? Well because it is only being disabled for new users by default. If you have link data in the database, then the link manager will stay as is. But if you don’t have any links, then it will be disabled. In other words, the code for the link manager still stays in the core. This is to make sure that this update doesn’t break your site or delete your data.

However, in the future the plan is to get rid of the link manager code base from the core and make it into a plugin. Andrew Nacin, one of the core contributor already created a plugin called Link Manager. Currently, the purpose of this plugin is to give new users the ability to enable the link manager in version 3.5 if they choose to.

If you are still using the Link Manager or want to use the link manager, then we ask why? You can achieve all that the link manager offers and more with the built-in WordPress menus. To see how, just look at our last article about this issue.

We are definitely excited to have one less menu item. What are your thoughts?