Category Sync?

Hi Rob,

Thanks for getting in touch. You’re correct about the cause of the problem — the feed that you sent me doesn’t contain any category elements. A couple quick questions, just so I can better understand the situation and what you might be able to do to resolve it —

1. Is this a feed that’s being generated from a custom post type? (Like, from Portfolio Items or something similar, which are stored in the source site’s wp_posts table but which are not listed as ordinary posts?)

2. Do you have control over both ends of this transaction? I.e., I notice that the source site here is a WordPress site as well; do you have direct access to the admin interface and settings for the source site that you’re trying to pull the posts from?

Thanks,
-C

Hey thanks for the response!

The answer is:

1. Yes. Its a Portfolio post type

2. Yes, I own both sites.

Thanks!

Okay, thanks. Sorry I’ve been slow in getting back to you.

So, I did some quick testing and double-checking on custom post types and the feeds that they generate, and it looks to me like your source site’s feed **OUGHT** to be including categories in the feed **IF** your custom post type uses the built-in WordPress Categories or Tags taxonomies (i.e., the same set of Categories or Tags that is used for posts); but by default it will **NOT** include categories from any other, custom taxonomy. So, are the categories you’re trying to sync here from a Custom Taxonomy (for example, are they called like “Portfolio Categories” or something similar like that)? If so, then the bad news is that WordPress won’t put this information into the feed according to its off-the-shelf behavior. But the good news is that since you control both ends of the transaction, it’s relatively easy to do some custom programming with a small PHP script to make it put the needed information onto the feed.

If that’s **NOT** the situation, then something deeper is going wrong that will require some more in-depth trouble-shooting.

So, just to check in real quick — is the situation that you’re using a Custom Taxonomy which you’re trying to sync from the source site to the destination site? Or no? Or are you not sure?

Thanks,
-C