Att. Categories list is incomplete!

Please see screenshot of the problem here:

Hm… WP deleted my link? Weird. Here it is now:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7JEImS_HANHSjRoekZYSFo4Tk0/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for the question and especially for posting the screenshot, which is quite interesting!

The ATT. Categories taxonomy edit screen is produced by WordPress, not by the plugin. The quick editing feature is WordPress as well. All the MLA plugin does is add the “Attachments” column, using a filter provided by WordPress. I’m not sure why this screen does not list all your categories. They are clearly there, because the upper right corner of the screen (below the search box) clearly shows 21 categories split across two pages.

What happens of you click the > or >> links after the “1 of 2” label in that area? Do some or all of the other categories appear?

Maybe there’s something odd about the “+featured” category that’s affecting the display. I tried adding a “+featured” category to my list – it worked fine. Maybe there’s something else going on with the database entries for your categories. Try adding something like “ABC Media Categories” and seeing of it shows up above the current list. You can also try deleting the +featured category, looking at the resulting list and then adding the +featured category back in.

If none of the above tips give you a solution, let me know and I can do more research. Let me know what you find out either way; thanks.

What happens of you click the > or >> links after the “1 of 2” label in that area? Do some or all of the other categories appear?

An empty list appears.

Maybe there’s something odd about the “+featured” category that’s affecting the display. I tried adding a “+featured” category to my list – it worked fine.

That helps me remember more details of how to replicate the bug. I added the “+photograph” category and it showed up fine. THEN I tried quick-editing it because the default slug came up as “photograph-images” and I wanted just “photograph”. That’s when the problem started I think.

Try adding something like “ABC Media Categories” and seeing of it shows up above the current list.

It does show up above the current list, but nothing else does.

You can also try deleting the +featured category, looking at the resulting list and then adding the +featured category back in.

I would try that with either “+” category but since they don’t show up I don’t know their IDs and can’t rebuild the delete link…

-> The good news is that this is not causing an actual problem for me but I though I’d let you know of this erratic behavior. I hope we can find a solution at some point in case there’s a way for you to prevent it from your end or at least add the note to your plugin’s documentation about category naming standards (avoiding certain characters or whatever it is).

You’ve given a clue:

I added the “+photograph” category and it showed up fine. THEN I tried quick-editing it because the default slug came up as “photograph-images” and I wanted just “photograph”. That’s when the problem started I think.

The default slug came up as “photograph-images” because the “photograph” slug was already in use. Changing it back to “photograph” should have given you an error message (it does for me in my tests). It sounds like the taxonomy tables in your database have been scrambled in some way.

If you can make a backup of the taxonomy tables (terms, term_relationships and term_taxonomy) and share them with me on GoogleDocs I might be able to figure out what the problem is. You can use a WordPress plugin such as “WordPress Database Backup” v2.2.3 by Austin Matzko to do that. Do you have access to a database admin utility such as “phpMyAdmin” for your site? If so, you might be able to repair the tables.

If you would rather pursue this offline, send me your e-mail address and I will give you an e-mail address you can use to e-mail me more information. Go to the “Contact Us” page at our web site:

Fair Trade Judaica/Contact Us

I’m confident that Media Library Assistant did not contribute to this problem, but I’m happy to work with you to fix it and make sure I’m right. Let me know how I can help.

Wow thanks that’s what I call customer service.

I went to phpMyAdmin and looked around in the tables you mentioned but didn’t find any anomalies. I’m not familiar with wp database structure however. Here are snapshots of the relevant info. in those tables (sorry, I was too lazy to JOIN them):

• terms https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7JEImS_HANHRlJ2WG1tc3RvYkk/edit?usp=sharing
• term_taxonomy https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7JEImS_HANHbWxZTzlia21sVm8/edit?usp=sharing
• term_relationships https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7JEImS_HANHT1hjTmtFWUh2UE0/edit?usp=sharing *note 253 results… and I don’t know what the object_id is supposed to point to

*also note that in the database the slug is still photograph-images so the quick edit didn’t work, things just got messed up by wp :/

p.s. sorry it took me so long to reply to this, I had put this project on a side for some time.

In response to my previous reply:

You can also try deleting the +featured category, looking at the resulting list and then adding the +featured category back in.

I would try that with either “+” category but since they don’t show up I don’t know their IDs and can’t rebuild the delete link…

I found the IDs from phpMyAdmin but these categories are already being used (as you can note form the row’s count) and I can’t just delete them anymore…

I tried renaming both +photograph and +featured switching the plus sign for an x (xphotograph and xfeatured) just in case the symbol was causing problems but nothing changed ?? so I went back to +.

Finally, I explored the HTML of the Att. Categories list generated by WP in case there was a missing tag close or something like that causing the other 21 elements (which as you noted are actually counted on the top right corner of the screen) but there really isn’t anything else. The one showing category is the nly <tr> in the <tbody>.

> Again, this bug is not causing me any real problems fortunately so please don’t feel obligated to further look into it unless you’re intrigued about it.

Thanks for the kind words and for this update. Of course I’m intrigued about this issue!

With respect to your observation:

*also note that in the database the slug is still photograph-images so the quick edit didn’t work, things just got messed up by wp :/

Try using the full-screen “Edit” instead of the “Quick Edit”. If you change the slug back to “photograph” there you should see an “Item not updated.” message at the top of the screen. Slugs must be unique, and item 159 has already claimed “photograph” so item 3743 can’t use it.

Here are a couple of further ideas, based on my cursory examination of the WordPress code for building the terms display screen/table.

First, have you tried using the “Search Att. Categories” box in the upper-right corner of the screen to look for “featured” or “photograph” or the other terms that are not displayed in the table? The search box bypasses some of the code WordPress normally uses for hierarchical taxonomies like ATT. Category.

Second, since you know your way around phpMyAdmin, could you use its Export function to dump the terms, term_taxonomy and term_relationship tables and post them to Google Docs or send them to me by e-mail? If I had a complete dump of these table I could try to reproduce the problem on my test system and then trace through the code to see what’s causing it.

I appreciate your persistence and I would like to get to the bottom of this issue if you can continue working with me on it. Thanks again for your help!

Try using the full-screen “Edit” instead of the “Quick Edit”. If you change the slug back to “photograph” there you should see an “Item not updated.” message at the top of the screen.

True.

have you tried using the “Search Att. Categories” box in the upper-right corner of the screen to look for “featured” or “photograph” or the other terms that are not displayed in the table?

Great idea! I tried searching for “+photo” and the system did find and listed +photograph along with all the links to edit/delet/etc. Nice.

could you use its Export function to dump the terms, term_taxonomy and term_relationship tables and post them to Google Docs or send them to me by e-mail?

I’ll get in touch with you directly to organize that one. Thanks again.

The final resolution of this problem came in two parts.

The code that composes the terms table is in file wp-admin/includes/class-wp-terms-list-table.php, function display_rows_or_placeholder. For hierarchical taxonomies like attachment_category, this function calls function _get_term_hierarchy in file /wp-includes/taxonomy.php to find all the parent/children relationships in the taxonomy. For efficiency, this function stores the relationships in an option field, attachment_category_children. If the option is present, the function returns its contents without re-computing the relationships.

I believe that the option field has been corrupted for some reason, and no longer reflects the current relationships in the taxonomy. When this happens, there are two ways to fix the problem.

1. You can use phpMyAdmin to find and delete the option value; it will be re-created the next time you display the terms table.

2. You can also force re-calculation by adding a new Att. Category term as a child of any other parent. As soon as I did that, the problem was fixed and everything was displayed correctly. You can then delete the new category and the fix will stick.

In this case, neither of the two fixes resolved the problem. Further investigation revealed that the site was also running the Role Scoper plugin, which makes its own copy of the relationships in an option with a slightly different name (attachment_category_children_rs). This option also had a corrupted value.

Although I did not hear the final outcome, I think that deleting the attachment_category_children_rs option would have solved the problem. If not, re-configuring or disabling Role Scoper would be the next step.

I agree. Sorry for dropping the ball on following up with you but now I have Role Scoper disabled and the list displays correctly. I’ve also upgraded to MLA 1.30 .

Thanks so much for all your support. And congrats again on this wonderful plugin… its really powerful.

Thank you for this update. I am happy that this issue has been resolved!