Upgrade caused loss of Categories

>> though that would suggest that at one time your blog was at a pre-2.2 version

I’ve written it down this time! ??

Hi. Michael thanks for your reply. I did kind of a workaround now to at least get the WP working correctly. Just installed a new regular one. Exported my stuff from the ‘old’ blog and imported to 2.3.2. Now I’ll just add the categories by hand (not so many post so far luckily). By adding my theme, plugins (which I had to update too anyway) and other ‘hacks’ I’ll get it working just about the way it ought to be.

It’s not quite an automated way, but will work for once ??

Thank anyway…

Ok this might help; I too had the same problem, but I distinctly remember forgetting to deactivate my plugins. I use: DiggIT, Excerpt Editor, ImageManager and Inline JavScript Plugin (which I cant get to work anyway).

On my server I upgraded from 2.2.3 to 2.3.2 and the result was no categories on the site or admin areas and no blogroll.

I then upgraded my local copy of the website, which actually went 2.2.1 to 2.3.2, This time I remembered to DEACTIVE my plugins!! and their are no issues at all.

So I can only conclude (from my own experience) that (unless the problem is between 2.2.1 and 2.2.3) it is due to not deactivating plugins.

Oh wait I just went from 2.3.2 to 2.2.3 and the categories have gone ?? ….

Reupgraded to 2.3.2 and all is fine again. I’m guessing its the plugins at fault.

Lorax, thank you for your trial-and-error. I just upgraded from like, version 1.5 to the latest version, and at first I had everything there, and then nothing at all. Everything was in the database, posts showed up before while I was tweaking the way the theme displays, but then everything disappeared, and there was no access to the posts, categories, or anything.

After reading your post, I tried simply erasing the new wp-config.php file in the root directory, and uploading my old wp-config file. Viola! Everything works. That’s great, because I have to host a blog carnival in 2 days!

Those 2 lines make quite a bit of difference.

Hello,

I upgraded from 2.1.2 to 2.3.2. and lost 90% of my categories in the admin. I can still get to them from the blog though, thank God, but not through my admin.

I tried forcing the database, made sure plugins were turned off, reinstalled, etc. but still no luck. I read through each post here but have not found the answer.

I’ll try reading again but has there been a fix I missed/

Thanks in advance.

https://www.theweblicist.com

PS: it not did effect my main categories only my sub-categories.

Freaky

I added a category named test, It said something weird just happened and to refresh the page. I hit refresh and viola! all may categories were back.

I am noyt sure what it did but I am not going to complain, I have over 4,000 images sorted in 475 categories. It would have been a tragedy to have lost them.

Chris

I wonder if this is theme or widget related? What theme are you guys using? I am not using widgets and use a variety of themes…

@InnoculatedMind – at the risk of appearing redundant, when doing an upgrade you should not being replacing your wp-config.php with a new wp-config.php file. In your case you reverted back to the original wp-config.php file to make it work (same solution as lorax)

@zyxwvvwxyz – you said “It would have been a tragedy to have lost them.” Since you have backups, you should never lose anything.

I love Backups, lol.

I am using milo’s Fog theme which doesn’t use widgets at all. I did notice that a couple of plug-ins I was using caused some database errors but they disappeared when I shut them off.

I think the lesson here is upgrade often. I had not done one since 2.1.2 because I didn’t want to lose the wp-list-cats tag. Stupid of me.

( in ref to MichaelH: Blogs upgraded from pre 2.2 should not have those define statements–and they should continue to NOT have those define statements.)

We’re trying to upgrade a huge existing 2.1.3 blog because we now need Unicode support. First we were really frustrated that we had to be running *the very last version* that didn’t support unicode… Now we’re halfway through this upgrade, we lost all our categories (not that we don’t have backups, but hey, that was a lot of time lost), and now you’re telling me we’ll *never* be able to have unicode?

Why was there no warning back when 2.1.3 was the current version to the effect of “hey, if you set up a blog with our software today, you’ll never be able to fully upgrade again?” Please tell me there is some way for us to be able to enable unicode on our blog and have an actual up-to-date version that can do everything that 2.3.2 is supposed to do…!??! Is there a list of the database changes that would need to actually take place? I mean, we’re not even going up a major version here – this is still version 2.x?? If the changes are so drastic, why not call it 3.x? It’s pretty standard practice when the underlying structure changes so dramatically…

Also, why wasn’t all this information on how not to lose your categories somewhere in the upgrade documentation? We followed all the steps, I mean, are we supposed to read every single message board post about upgrading before each upgrade?

@jove4015 – you may want to review Editing_wp-config.php and Converting_Database_Character_Sets.

Okay I’m having to hijack this post because I can’t seem to get anyone to help me with my categories problem.

I’ve posted it three times. Even in the sticky. Can someone PLEASE HELP????

I used Manage > Import > Categories to Tags

and things finally took off for me. In older versions, I used /tag as the category base. When I removed /tag, things started working… but I lost all of the previously indexed URLs for the categories.

I converted the categories to tags within the admin and after that, I was able to use the old URLs that had already been indexed (using /tag as category base).

The other suggestions in here worked great at allowing me to start creating new categories, but the old permalinks still were not working until I converted the categories into tags.

Has anyone solved this yet? You can’t import categories to tags if you don’t have any, or at least WP thinks there aren’t any, even though they exist in wp_terms.

Anyway everything works fine, but cannot add categories. When I edit an existing post, all categories are listed in the right pane, but when I save – the post remains uncategorized. This is a real issue that must be resolved. There must be 5 threads on this and none of the proposed solutions work…