Recently I installed WordPress 3.5 in my local machine and found out that wordpress links manager menu is missing in the dashboard menus. WordPress links manager is a very handy tool used to categorized and create external links on the wordpress site and display them in the links widget. The WordPress links manager allows users to display external links either as image urls, text urls or in both form.

To find out what exactly went wrong with my new wordpress 3.5 install, I have searched in the dashboard  settings menus to see if I can locate any setting to enable or disable to get this feature of external wordpress links manager back again, but nothing found as such. Then I did bit of research on the google to why wordpress links menu was not appear in new version of wordpress 3.5 installation, and then I found out that in the new WordPress 3.5 version they have removed the wordpress links manager from the core engine.  But I did a upgrade to one of my old existing site in the live server week ago, but the wordpress links manager was remained as it is. The reason for new wordpress 3.5 links manager to remain with the upgrade as it is, because it had active set of links with the old manager so, it remains there in the dashboard.

WordPress Links manager missing in New Install

Here is how the dashboard menu look like in a fresh install of wordpress 3.5;  No wordpress links manager

wordpress links manager missing

 

WordPress links manager remains for existing links

Here is how it looks like when you upgrade a wordpress site with existing active links it remains the Links menu tab as it is;

wordpress links manager missing According the wordpress codex site if you want to recall the old wordpress links manager panel for new installations,  you are required to download and install the Link Manager Plugn.  Once you install this plugin you can recall the same functionality with the plugin.