WordPress Links Categories In Different Sidebar Widgets

Posted by Jeff

on April 6, 2009

So far up to version 2.7.1, WordPress is still showing all the Links or Blogroll in just one sidebar widget. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could separate those links by categories? You can with a little help from a plugin.

WordPress is a very flexible CMS and once you understand the basics you can start to see its potential. In this case there is a limitation but with the use of the Single Bookmark Category List plugin, you can use it to separate the Links categories into their own sidebar widget. First you need to have a need for this and one would be to use these different links categories as a site navigation for a WordPress site. If you tend to use or create a lot of pages on your WordPress site you can create a Site Navigation link category and then add those pages to that link category.

The Links module has a Link Categories sub menu where you can as many links categories as you want. Add your links categories there and then use the Add New sub menu under the Links module to manually add new links and choose what category you want to place the link in. Be careful not to have the new links in more than one category, unless you want it to show in multiple categories.

Once you have your links categories setup and the Single Bookmark Category List plugin installed and activated you will have a new option on the bottom of the Widgets menu. As shown below click the drop-down to add as many single bookmark category widgets would you like.

category1

Now you will have additional Bookmark From Category widgets to add to the sidebar. Simply click Add next to one to move it to the sidebar.

category2

Once the bookmark widget is on the sidebar click Edit on the Bookmark widget to open it, choose what link category you want it to show and click Done.

category3

category4

Now just drag the individual Bookmark widgets to the vertical location of your choice on the sidebar and click Save Changes. As you can see here on this site I am showing three different Bookmarks From Category widgets on two separate sidebars; WordPress Links, More Great Sites and WordPress Themes. If you choose to use this option and plugin you might want to remove the default Links widget to not show duplicate links.

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Tags: Plugins, sidebar, wordpress-widgets

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Comments

Comment by Mizwar on April 6, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

great plugin….thanks for the info

Comment by Real Estate Marketing Tim O'Keefe on April 6, 2009 @ 11:11 pm

This should be just the trick on one of my large sites. Nice thanks.

Comment by Drop Shipping on April 7, 2009 @ 2:40 am

As I read more and more articles posted by you, I am amazed at the features offered by WordPress.

Comment by CDL Test on April 7, 2009 @ 8:25 am

good find on this plug-in. i was trying to figure out a work-around to do this.

Comment by Bleuken on April 9, 2009 @ 11:55 pm

I am usually contented with the links spread on my sidebar but I think this plug-in can make a clean look of my blog rolls. Actually a great improvement. Thanks for the recommendation.

Comment by Xbox 360 on April 11, 2009 @ 1:17 pm

yet another nice tutorial

You should combine all your tutorials together and sell as an eBook on eBay… or something similar

Jeff Replied:
April 11th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

I started out doing one but WP kept changing so often I gave up.

Comment by GregR on April 15, 2009 @ 6:54 pm

I am using Multiple Blog Roll Plugin to do this.

Comment by Blackjack cards counting on April 16, 2009 @ 7:20 am

Since i am working with my wordpress sites currently, any information related to wordpress is really important for me & this one was actually cool.Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Blackjack cards on May 1, 2009 @ 7:26 am

I am still confused about the utility of the Blogroll

Comment by HO Trains on June 19, 2009 @ 9:39 am

WordPress Widgets (WPW) is like a plugin, but designed to provide a simple … a general purpose sidebar widget for a list of user-defined text and links. … Category Cloud Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud. … allows you to duplicate widgets in the same or different sidebar …

Comment by Small business marketing tool on June 21, 2009 @ 10:42 am

Thanks for the info. This makes organising really easy. The screenshots help to understand the concept.Separating links by categories is really great!

Comment by free games on July 6, 2009 @ 9:26 am

I never know about this plugin! This is just what I need,, Thanks for all of the informative article in this site.. Sure will coming back for more ^^

Nice to know you..

Comment by stephanie on July 30, 2009 @ 6:29 pm

I get it now, so I can separate my sites which I link to in my blogroll? But why would you want to do that? could I have say finance web links then sport links? still not sure why you would do this. but its a good plugin if you wanted to.

Jeff Replied:
July 30th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

You can use this plugin to separate your links.

Comment by Cash Loans on August 6, 2009 @ 7:15 pm

This looks like it will be a great plugin for my needs.

Drive-By comments will be deleted! Like "Thanks for sharing", "Nice post", or any other text that doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you ask a very specific question about your particular WordPress theme, it will probably be deleted. I can fix your WordPress site but for a price. If you ask a question like "Why don't my blog work right", it will be deleted. If you ask a question about your WordPress site without a leaving a link to it, it will be deleted. The point is to ask questions and or comment on the the actual content of the post, and to please use some common sense. All comments are moderated and will appear when approved. Thank you.