Displaying Blogrolls by Category

One of the more limiting features of the Widgets in WordPress is the inability to disperse your different blogroll link lists to different areas of your template. By using the Links Widget packaged within WordPress, your blogrolls will all appear in the same spot. This is a fine thing, if you only have one blogroll category. But what about those sites that have more than one… or even several, blogroll categories??

Further, what if that particular person doesn’t want all the blogrolls to appear in the same spot, listed one after another? Using the Links Widget, you have no choice really - at least not at this time. You place the Blogroll Widget in your sidebar and all your link lists appear in the same spot.

So, say you run a tech blog and you have a Blogroll category for Windows and another category for Macintosh. And you want to display the Windows blogroll in the left sidebar, and want to display the Macintosh category in the right sidebar. You can’t split the widget (unless you have the coding know-how to edit the actual widgets.php file)!

You can, however, insert a template tag in your sidebar.php template to display the blogroll categories wherever you want them to display:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('category=1'); ?>

Where the 1 equals the category ID number (which you can find listed to the left of the bookmark category in your WP administration panel under Blogroll / Categories. Just change the ID number to match the category of links you’d like to display.

Likewise, you can list the blogrolls by category name by using:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('category_name=category'); ?>

Having to insert the code into the template kind of defeats the purpose of using Sidebar Widgets in the first place, but until WordPress updates the Links Widget - there’s no real getting around having to do it this way in order to split up those Blogroll Categories.

Or - to make it MUCH easier - you can use Breukies Links Widget by widget author Arnold Breukhoven - a WordPress links widget, to replace the standard links widget by Automattic. This widget displays links using the wp_list_bookmarks function, utilizes most available parameters for wp_list_bookmarks. You can also set up to 9 intances of this widget in your sidebar(s).