Stop creating the `wp_links` database table

[johnjamesjacoby]

In WordPress 3.5 (2012) the Links feature was disabled by default in new WordPress installations, and was hidden for old installations that had no links.

See #21307.

Every new WordPress site since then (including multisite) has continued to create an empty wp_links database table for a feature that was sunsetted 5 years ago.

[SergeyBiryukov]

There's a ​Link Manager plugin to restore the feature, the table creation code should probably be moved there, maybe with all the UI that remains hidden in the admin.

[johnjamesjacoby]

I don't think this will just be as easy as removing the table from schema.php, as there is the database option to set link_manager_enabled back to 1, and also a plugin to re-expose the Links functionality by filtering that option.

Still, it seems wasteful to be creating all these empty database tables, particularly for web-hosts.

Each empty table occupies approximately 16 KiB. Every 1 million WordPress sites creates 1.02GB of empty databases.

[lukecavanagh]

@SergeyBiryukov 

So move the database creation for the links tables into the plugin, then remove the db table creation from the schema.php in core then?

[lukecavanagh]

Basic patch to remove the links db table from schema.php

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #42131

[swissspidy]

Related: #42136.

The original goal was to have all the code in the plugin, things just never got that far.

[desrosj]

Replying to swissspidy:

Related: #42136.

The original goal was to have all the code in the plugin, things just never got that far.

I'd like to restart discussion around this. I've created #56362 to discuss a larger plan to finish executing this. I'm marking as a close candidate pending agreement that the API should be moved into the plugin on that ticket.