Easy Fix For Missing Categories in WordPress 2.6
It happened! The unimaginable! I’d been creating new blogs in WordPress 2.6 and slowly getting used to the new look and Dashboard changes and thought I would upgrade some of my blogs to this new version. I did a couple and they worked well so I decided to upgrade this one too. That’s when it happened. My categories went missing! And I didn’t know how to get them back again.
They weren’t showing in the menu sidebar – just an empty spot and when I logged into the Dashboard and viewed the Categories list, there were rows of empty tickboxes with no names and a number at the end of each line indicating the number of posts for that invisible category listing.
Searches at WordPress Support didn’t come up with any answers for me, although many were asking for help on the same thing, but Googling did produce some results with some step-by-steps on how to fix the problem. But there were steps missing! The first part was relatively easy and I was able to successfully make changes inside phpMyAdmin and get the categories list showing but there was no explanation on how to link the tables back up (perhaps that knowledge was assumed by the writers) and since I’ve never done it before I was not going to attempt something with no clear instructions on what to do next.
They also assumed that you had a backup file you could use to find out what all your categories were – wrong! Mine isn’t writeable to the directory so I have xml files I have exported and can import but don’t have a back up file to refer to. I must fix that issue one day too!
However, I discovered a really easy way of doing it in WordPress, and thought I’d share it here for those who are not game to fiddle with the database on their server.
I did a manual fix.
- After thinking about this a great deal I decided to create a new category to see what would happen. It showed – that was good.
- So I placed one of my posts with that and that worked.
- Then I ticked all the other blank categories listed and clicked on the delete button. Everything automatically defaulted to ‘uncategorised’ which was still showing as blank (and is not removeable) but I knew that the first listing there was the uncategorised list.
- After that I recreated my categories and reconnected everything – there were 118 posts so that wasn’t too bad and only took me 2-3 hours to do.
The good thing about this was I got to rethink all the categories I have listed here and reconnected some posts to belong to more than one category so in effect, my blog got tidied up in the process.
So, if you are too scared to touch the real techy side of your blog and want a fix that you can do, without calling in help, the above should work for you – it did for me!
I might actually spend sometime learning php and then create my own template from scratch. But for now there are enough choices out there to keep me happy.
