RSS Blogroll vs VS Link Manager

I don’t really like Blogrolls, I think they’re often not much more than glorified link dumps. I don’t like how they give you nothing more than the Blog title, and unless that title really grabs your attention, you’re never gonna click it. I don’t like how they are often just a static list, commonly out of date, that you learn to ignore after the first 4 page views. In their current format, they just appear to be a great waste of space. This is why I decided to create the RSS Blogroll plugin. RSS Blogroll allows you to link to your favourite blogs via the latest items from their RSS/Atom feed. Article titles are much more attention grabbing and will deliver much higher quality traffic. We all hate clicking through to abandoned blogs – displaying article publication dates also lets readers know these are up to date and active sites. Many of us want to direct some of our traffic to related sites. RSS Blogroll will create deeplinks to the target sites, which are much more useful for SEO than homepage links. Overall it’s a win-win situation with a better browsing experience for users and the linked sites getting more visitors who are actually interested in their content.

About With this lightweight plugin you can display a set of links from the Link Manager. The Link Manager is part of WordPress but disabled by default. This plugin will activate it again. Main features of the plugin: Free and lightweight Support for Block Editor and Classic Editor Display your link list with block, shortcode or widget Customize your link list with attributes Documentation at WP plugin page Active support from developer at WP forum With this plugin you can also create a blogroll or link portal in the same way as a link list. How to use After installation go to menu item “Links” and create some categories and links. Links must be assigned to a category. Go to the editor and add the VS Link Manager block or the shortcode [links] to a page. This will display your link list. Or go to Appearance > Widgets and use the VS Link Manager widget. Default settings categories: 4 columns when using block or shortode 1 column when using widget 2 columns in small screens Order by name Ascending order (A-Z) Empty categories are hidden Default settings links: Order by name Ascending order (A-Z) All links are displayed Customize your link list with attributes. Attributes You can customize your link list by adding attributes to the block, shortcode or widget. Add custom CSS class to link list: class="your-class-name" Change the number of columns: columns="3" Disable the columns: columns="0" Include certain categories: include="1,3,5" Exclude certain categories: exclude="8,10,12" Display empty categories too: hide_empty="0" Display category description: category_description="true" Change the number of links per category: links_per_category="5" Reverse the order of links: order="DESC" Display links by ID: orderby="ID" Display links in random order: orderby="rand" Hide link title: link_title="false" Hide link description: link_description="false" Change feed label: feed_label="your label" Change the “no categories are found” text: no_categories_text="your text" Example: [links include="1,3,5" category_description="true" links_per_category="5"] When using the block or the widget, don’t add the main shortcode tag or the brackets. Example: include="1,3,5" category_description="true" links_per_category="5" With the columns attribute you can set the number of columns between 1 and 4. In small screens max 2 colums. You can disable the columns in favour of your own styling. The columns attribute will be ignored when using the block or widget. Because you can set the columns via the block or widget settings. With the “hide link title” attribute you can hide the link title if the link has an image assigned to it. This way you can display the link image only, instead of both. Widget This plugin activates the Links widget again. Because this widget is part of WordPress, plugin has no control over it. You can use the VS Link Manager widget instead. Have a question? Please take a look at the FAQ section. Translation Translations are not included, but the plugin supports WordPress language packs. More translations are very welcome! The translation folder inside this plugin is redundant, but kept for reference. Credits Without help and support from the WordPress community I was not able to develop this plugin, so thank you!