Post seems to have category applied but doesn’t show it in dashboard

  • I’m working on troubleshooting a site where multiple posts seem to have categories applied but don’t show them in the dashboard (confusing, I know). The Posts>Categories page on the dashboard shows 3 posts with this category.

    When I view Posts (Posts>All Posts) and filter by that same category, I show the expected 3 results. But only two of them actually show the category in the table. The third just shows the “empty”/”not applicable” extended length hyphen.

    If I quick-edit the post that’s semi-categorized, it doesn’t show the category there either.

    This seems to periodically happen as well, not a one-time thing and not just upon creation. I’m not the one who manages these posts, but I believe some posts have had the categories “disappear” multiple times.

    The site is using Elementor and several other plugins, but I’m leaning toward that not being relevant because this seems to be displaying on the Categories, Posts, and quick-edit screens which seem like they’re all built-in core functionalities.

    I’d appreciate if you have any suggestions on where I might look next or what I might try to narrow down what’s going here.

    • This topic was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by jasonrush.
    • This topic was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by jasonrush.
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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Default behavior is that all posts should have at least one category assigned. If one tries to remove all categories, whatever is chosen as the default in writing settings would normally be automatically applied.

    Apparently your theme or a plugin has implemented alternative behavior, but maybe was not totally thorough about doing so. If you were to explicitly assign a particular category to this “semi-categorized” post, does it then appear as expected? If so I recommend always assigning a category to all posts. If it’s so important that some posts have no category at all, not even “Uncategorized”, I recommend trying to determine what theme or plugin is supposedly allowing this, then seeking further assistance through its dedicated support channel.

    Thread Starter jasonrush

    (@jasonrush)

    I’ve been trying to add screenshots to my post and response, but something here’s not happy. These posts started out with categories applied, but they seem to randomly “disappear”. I’m still investigating when/why/how that happens as I have ideas on additional things to investigate or additional ways to troubleshoot/test.

    When the categories “disappear”, they no longer show the category on the post (when listing in the “All Posts” page in dashboard, quick edit, or edit). But when I filter the “All Posts” table to only display the given category, the post is still listed. Even though it shows a “-” in the Categories tab.

    I have cloned the site, confirmed the issue there, and started disabling plugins and changing to a default theme. After disabling every plugin and changing to a twenty-whatever theme, the “All Posts” table is still listing the post while filtering by category, but still showing the category as “-“.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    You can post images to any public image sharing site like imgur.com and just provide the resulting link here.

    Consider the possibility that the issue lies not with a particular plugin or theme, but that your database has somehow become corrupted. Hopefully not, but the symptoms your describe point this way. This can be difficult to correct. Often the best course of action is to revert back to the last known good backup.

    How might have the DB become corrupted? Any number of ways, but it is conceivable the root cause was faulty code of a theme or plugin. If code were to directly interact with the DB without going through WP functions intended for the purpose, that code is more likely to accidentally corrupt the DB.

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