I just wrote my first official WordPress plugin and have it listed in the WordPress plugin repository! Import Blogroll With Categories
By default, WordPress is lacking the functionality to handle categorized OPML feeds of links. When importing blogroll/links you are FORCED to select ONE category for ALL links to be inserted into.
My plugin adds an importer to WordPress, which is actually a modification of the standard OPML importer shipped with WP 2.7. The improved importer actually handles categories.
If the link categories already exist in your blog, links from the import within matching (case-insensitive) category names will be inserted into the correct category.
You can specify one of two options for the case where your blog doesn’t already have some categories that are found in the feed.
1) Allow it to create any new link categories needed (and insert the links into them)
2) Specify a default category that the links from unknown categories will be inserted into
I got jump start on some the coding changes a while ago here: http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2008/02/27/how-to-hack-the-wordpress-blogroll-importer-to-recognize-categories-from-your-feed-reader/
Until YESTERDAY there has been an item in the WordPress Trac that indicated that the milestone for its implementation in WordPress was version 2.8. I believe it would have nullified the reason for my plugin to exist. However, apparently, someone just changed the milestone from 2.8 to “Future Release (no date set)”.
So it looks like my plugin will still be useful for a long time =)
I’ve documented the steps of creating a plugin and getting it into the WordPress plugin repository here: Writing a WordPress Plugin
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