Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Each time I add a Category many others disappear. Anxious
Hi TXPers,
This is a first.
I have a 4.2 install where if I add a new category, clicking ‘Create’ shows no errors, but the refreshed page returns with all the sub-cats removed from one of the top level cats.
I can import a backup by phpmyadmin and re-create this scenario (I keep doing it like a rabbit in the headlights).
I assume it’s irrelevant, but some of the categories have no articles in them (yet).
I’ve tried installing the 4.0.8 build of rss_admin_db_manager (closest to 4.2 I could find) and did a repair of all tables. Then I discovered (duh) you can repair within phpmyadmin, done it there too.
In case it’s relevant, I had rss_unlimited_categories installed (but turned off). I’ve tried turning it on, deleting it. No avail.
I’ve looked for others with ‘disappearing categories’ but failed — if anyone has any ideas on what might be causing this or how to fix it, I would be very grateful. Sorry to add another “help me” post here :(
Thanks lots in advance for any comments. Cheers, -Alan
At LAST I’ve cheerfully donated to the core devs at #TXP. I only wish I were able to give more. Thanks to the devs and ALL fellow TXPers. -A
Offline
Re: Each time I add a Category many others disappear. Anxious
Update: In case useful in finding the problem, I just tried adding: Articles and also adding Link, Image and File categories and all is OK. But I have found if I even write to the Article Categories, e.g. by re-naming the title of one (let alone adding a new one), it collapses as described.
At LAST I’ve cheerfully donated to the core devs at #TXP. I only wish I were able to give more. Thanks to the devs and ALL fellow TXPers. -A
Offline
Re: Each time I add a Category many others disappear. Anxious
FIXED! but I would love to know how this happened
I noticed in phpmyadmin that the parent category for all the child categories that kept disappearing was called info-on-reviews, but I’ve no idea how that happened (unless I am going gaga), because there is no category with that name. They should have had the parent reviews. I hand edited them to have a parent of reviews in phpmyadmin and then tried to edit a category in the TXP Admin i/f — all worked AOK.
Relieved but worried how I got a load of categories set with a parent category that didn’t exist…
Any comments, welcome.
At LAST I’ve cheerfully donated to the core devs at #TXP. I only wish I were able to give more. Thanks to the devs and ALL fellow TXPers. -A
Offline
Re: Each time I add a Category many others disappear. Anxious
There’s some trickery that goes on to allow storage of a category hierarchy in a “flat” database (search “modified preorder tree” for more info). One effect of this trickery is that if your category table ever suffers a loss of data integrity, hand editing is often necessary to fix the problem. If you’ve fixed the issue, great. If you’re still getting strange behavior, an approach is to flatten the entire tree, by giving every category a parent of “root”, then recreating the hierarchy (could do this through the usual Txp admin interface, I think). (Should only have to do this with the affected category type — e.g. article categories only.)
Code is topiary
Offline
Re: Each time I add a Category many others disappear. Anxious
Thanks lots for the insight Jeff — most helpful to have some context to this.
Cheers! -Alan
At LAST I’ve cheerfully donated to the core devs at #TXP. I only wish I were able to give more. Thanks to the devs and ALL fellow TXPers. -A
Offline