Wrong category showing in Elementor

Are you absolutely sure your shortcode is correct? My suspicion is that what you see on the Dog Journal page is not a repeat of the Columns shortcode but just a list of latest posts sorted by date. This is what the plugin does if parameters provided in the shortcodes are wrong.

The two lists are displaying identically. Shortcode being used on the columns/positive research page is [catlist name=columns number=20] and catlist name=positiveresearch number=20] and on the dog journal page it’s [catlist name=dog journal number=20]. Results are the same if I use dogjournal, Dog Journal, DogJournal, or if I use ID=3. I get the same 20 items. If I use the built in category widget, the category entries are listed correctly so I know it’s not that WordPress doesn’t know which post is which category.

The two lists are displaying identically.

They are not: this page has pagination with 9 pages, but the page you are having a problem with has 16 pages, so the lists are different.

As I suspected the reason is the shortcode is incorrect. If you want to pass a value that has a space inside you need to surround it with quotes, so name="dog journal" and not name=dog journal. This is true for all WordPress shortcodes, not just this plugin.

To get this category to work you can use its name or slug, so either name="Dog Journal" or name="dog-journal" should work.

Thank you! The documentation showed the name and ID parameters without quotes, although other items do show as needing quotes. Adding quotes to the dog journal page did fix the issue (which was that two or three of the categories were being listed). Oddly, on the other page where I used the short codes, it worked correctly without the quotes. I’ve added them there too just for consistency.

Yes, shortcodes work fine without quotes but when there is a space inside the value you want to pass quotes are obligatory. It’s true that the docs have examples with and without quotes but they all work because there is never a space without a quote.

Best practice is to always use quotes in shortcodes, though. It makes them more readable and prevents errors.