It’s ages since I did a new WordPress install, and in fact, it’s so long that I cannot remember. There’s some evidence to suggest it’s at least three years.

I did two new installs today for the lace and sketch sites and it transpires that I don’t have access to blogroll any more without installing a plugin. If I go to the plug in recommended it hasn’t been updated in more than 2 years. In fact, the blogroll was hidden by default from WordPress 3.5.

Apparently not that many people used it so it was taken out of the core product. Fine. WordPress is free and all that. But when they tell you to use a plug in instead and then don’t update the plugin for 2 years, it’s annoying particularly when, apparently, the links manager is still in the product, works for any update of existing sites. Don’t enable the widget by default, fine. Taking it off me completely, that’s annoying.

I really, really don’t like it when functionality is removed from a software product and it’s not adequately documented why it’s been removed. The only comment I can find on WordPress.org about it is under the aforementioned plugin to say “it is being removed in WordPress 3.5”. But no “because”.

Since the plugin hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, it’s safe to say that the links manager wasn’t a big coding drag on the product, and since it is still hidden in there for backwards compatibility, I fail to see why they had to hide it. I’m not very happy about that while noting that yes WordPress is free and currently every site I have runs on it. That being said. I’m not impressed by this. It was quick and simple to manage. Yes you can use a custom menu for this but…arghh.