Revisiting: Blogroll OPML Export

A comment left on my plugin announcement post has pointed me in a new direction. It turns out that this function indeed DOES exist in WordPress, but it is highly under-documented barely mentioned in the WordPress Codex. I think initially my searches were too narrow, which is why I never ran across any of the following information.

Gonahkar’s comment gave me something new to search on, and I was able to find it mentioned in the WordPress Codex under WordPress Files:

wp-links-opml.php

Produces OPML output of Links that were added to the blog via the WordPress admin menu.

A note at the top of the page states that the file descriptions are for WordPress Version 2.x. I was unable to find this file mentioned anywhere else in the documentation. However, under WordPress Features I stumbled across a reference to the export function:

Exporting

Did we say you can also export an OPML file with your list o’ links?

Very cute, guys … c’mon, where is the rest of the documentation on this? From this point, I clicked through to the section on the Links Manager. The page starts with the following:

WordPress allows you to store a set of external links, also known as your blogroll. These links can be put into categories, imported, exported, added, deleted, and edited.

However, the export feature is not mentioned again on the page, nor any others pertinent to WordPress’ current release. The only other mention that I was able to find was this:

Features

* Plugin architecture
* Custom fields
* Sub-categories
* Thumbnail creation
* OPML import and export

These are from the WordPress 1.2 changelog, which tells me that this ability has most likely been in WordPress a while. It’s highly possible it’s been forgotten, or maybe it’s been left out for a good reason. I can’t but speculate as to its reason … but at least now I know it does exist.

I may revise my plugin in the next few days to include this information and will most likely alter its purpose/function.