Why are my categories not displaying?

Cats need a post in them to show up. No problem. Welcome to WP.

See, the latest post was placed in two different categories and neither of them are showing up… The only category that shows up is “General”… and the post was not placed in that category.

What version of WP are you running ?

I’m running 1.2 Any thoughts?

I have restored the index.php file to see if something I did to it made the categories not display but they still don’t show up.
This one has me really stumped. Any help is appreciated.

I’m having the same issue. Just installed wordpress yesterday (vsn 1.2). Only ‘general’ category shows up. I have 20 cats, give or take and have posted in several of them but they are still not showing??? HELP!!! Thanx

I just installed a fresh installation of WP in another directory (completely unmodified) and they still don’t show up.
I can’t believe that we’re the only people with this issue…

You’re not the only ones!
I have had the same problem and thought it might be due to some template editing I had done – but now I’m not so sure it’s my fault.
I have seventeen categories – some empty except for the description but several with posts. The posts all show up and if I click on the category name associated with a post I get the appropriate selection, but only the general category is listed in the menu pane.
The categories do show up ok on another install I did, on a server where php’s dirname function didn’t seem to be working and where I had to put the paths in by hand but where I didn’t do any template editing. But in that case I only have two categories and in the problem case I have seventeen.

Thanks!! I tried that and it works fine. Does that not seem like a bug to anyone else?

It might not be a bug to require all categories to be subcategories of ‘General’, but it is a bug *not* to (ie to allow such categories to be created) if the categories so created disappear without explanation from the menu.
Anyhow, I’ll try it and see what happens.

Well, I tried putting everything in ‘General’ and it did not actually solve my problem (posted as ‘Anonymous’ above). But without doing that I probably wouldn’t have discovered the other issue.
Making all categories subcategories of ‘General’ was a necessary step, but only part of the solution. It also turns out that not only do categories without posts not show up, but neither do any of their subcategories – even if these do contain posts!
That sure looks like a bug to me, and in fact the whole idea of hiding categories with no posts seems unnecessary. It’s easy enough to work around by adding a ‘hello world’ type of posting in each category, but I’d rather not have display a bunch of poorly motivated material in order to have the site work properly.

acooper, I had the same problem; after creating all my categories under “general”, I made a test post to all categories and they didn’t show up. I had to re-install WP and then backed up my main css files and my index files in order not to lose all my settings.
It does work now though. Still, everything has to be under “general”.

What should those of us using 1.3 nightlies do? There are no categories. even the first post is UnCategorized. Will the first Catergory we create act as a General? Or in the new version can we create multiple Zero level Categories without the loss of subcategories?
Kind regards,
Gravity

I also encountered this problem. I found a solution that seems to work here:
https://www.skippy.net/wordpress/customize.html
Basically you should edit your index.php file in the “menu” section as follows in the menu section:
Delete or comment out this line which no longer seems to work:
<!– <?php wp_list_cats(); ?> –> <!– this does not seem to work any more… –>
Replace it with ”’one”’ of these lines, depending on how you want to sort your listed categories:
<?php list_cats(0, ‘All’, ‘name’); ?> <!– sort by name –>
<?php list_cats(0,’All’, ‘id’); ?> <!– sort by id –>
Also, this fix does not seem to require you to re-categorize all
categories under the “General” category.

ok, here is the offending line that does not seem to work:
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
(since it was commented out of the wiki post…)