Adding sidebar links outside of the blogroll (with formatting matching the sidebar)
 

I'd like to add a section of links to my sidebar, outside of my blogroll, and I'd like for them to match the formatting of the rest of the sidebar. I tried to do this with a text widget, but the formatting changed - the links followed the link formatting for the blog (bold and blue, turning red on rollover), rather than the special formatting I'm using for the sidebar links (gray, not bold, turning blue on rollover). Do you have any recommendations for how to do this?

FYI - I tried the multiple blogroll plugin, which would allow me to basically have two blogrolls with different links in different parts of my blog. This would have worked perfectly, except that it kept randomizing the order of the links, which was not what I wanted. :(

Have you tried link categories? "Blogroll" is just the default link category but you can add additional ones and add or move your links there. The additional link categories would be in their own widgets and styled like the blogroll. This would be the most elegant way to do this.

Otherwise look at the source code of your site and put that code into a text widget.

I might have to remove the "widget-content" DIV for the next version though as it currently doesn't work with a certain useful plugin http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=83 so it would be better if you used the "link category" technique (or leave out <div class="widget-content"> and one of the last two </div> - that should work too)

I finally got a chance to try this and it works perfectly. I wanted one category of links at the top of my sidebar, and the other at the bottom, so I simply categorizing wasn't working for me, but this works great.

As always, thanks so much for your help.

Hi,
is it possible to have a "subcategory" style here - I'm thinking of the indentation like we have at category widget?

Adam

Use

Wow, so simple! Thanks!
I taught that it requires some php or css tricks :-)

If I may have another question - what to do in the category menu widget to have no link to the category and links to sub-categories:
Something like this:

cats - no link
->nice cats - link to sub category
->black cats - link to sub category
->grey cats - link to sub category

Now when I click category "cats" it links to the page "Sorry nothing found here"
Maybe it is a simple trick to remove link from the category cats.

I have an idea to use the "blogroll" widget with manually edited links to serve as a category menu what has an advantage that I may sort the order of categories as I want but on the other hand requires manual editing everytime I add new category.

Adam

There's probably a plugin for that. But you shouldn't get "Sorry nothing found here" if you click on the top category link. You may have to update your permalinks by clicking Site Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks -> Save

Hi,
that "Sorry nothing found here" message is not an error page, it's just a message that category is empty.

I tried to link a page to this category with the "page2cat" plugin to add a static page to the "cats" link what I can accept.
Unfortunately, to link a page to the category there must be at least one post in that category. If the category is empty the plugin connection does not work.
So as a result I have some static page above a message with all kicker, byline and footer defined for a "multi post pages". That's not what I want.

Also I searched for the plugin to "unlink the category" or "link category to page" with no luck.

Maybe the simplest way would be to hardcode the "unliked" or linked to a static page category "cats" somewhere in php?

Thanks for your time,
Adam

I added a new link category this way and it worked for one new link. Now, I've tried 10 different ways to add a few more links to my new category and they keep showing up in "Blogroll." I've deleted them from Blogroll and re-added them back into my new category, save and then when I refresh the page they're back under "Blogroll" instead of my new category.
It's gotta be something stupid simple I'm missing ... but I'm not seeing it! Helllllp.

Either changing the default LINK CATEGORY to my new category fixed it or upgrading to the latest version of WP.