Can't save changes

Sorry, I don’t think I was specific enough in describing what is happening… Let’s say I have a post in categories A & B. Currently, A is set as the permalink, but I want to change it to B. Clicking Permalink in the post edit screen, then saving the post, doesn’t work. Now, as I mentioned, I’ve removed the affected post from the secondary category for now (let’s say A in the example above). That fixes the permalink problem. But if I try to delete the applicable redirections and resave the permalinks, return to the post and add back category A, then the permalink automatically reflects category A instead of B, even though B is selected as the permalink. Also, I noticed that when I select the permalink, the category becomes bold, but after I save, no category is bold. So, the changes aren’t being saved, it seems. Thanks again for the help!

Hi Julie,

Lets try to resolve this issue. As I’ve written shortly to another user – I suspect the problem is caused due to plugin conflict.

What version of WordPress are you using?

Please try disabling all plugins and lets see if this behavior appears.

Thanks,
Yaniv

For now though, until we figure out what’s happening – try installing this version of the plugin – https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/wp-category-permalink.1.6.zip

Hi Yaniv, thanks for getting back to me. I didn’t want to do either of the things you suggested, so I tested a few things out myself.

I used phpmyadmin to find all instances of category_permalink in the postmeta table, and found that some of the rows were empty. I manually inputted the correct values and went back to my site to recheck the posts in question. The correct permalinks were now displaying on all of them and the correct category was bolded.

However, when I saved updates to the posts, they again reverted to the previous permalinks, and no category was bolded. I tried with three different posts with the same results, so returned to phpmyadmin and saw that the values for the posts I updated are now empty again.

This tells me that the problem is on saving a post — nothing is being saved to the database table, and it’s being emptied if something was previously saved.

What’s strange is that for some of the posts, the incorrect permalink being set isn’t consistent with the default WordPress behaviour, which as I understand it should revert to alphabetical order. It seems to me that even though the values are empty in the database table, my previous permalink selections are being retained. Don’t know how they could be remembered if the metavalue is empty, unless something besides category_permalink is being used in the database?

Hope this helps you fix things. Looking forward to your reply. Cheers!

Hi Julie,

Thanks for helping out :), however since I’ve tested the plugin on WP v4.2 (and 4.2.1) and it worked, then trying to install v1.6 of the plugin or if that doesn’t help disabling your plugins until it works – would give us more information on why the plugin isn’t working for you.

Best,
Yaniv

How would reverting to v1.6 of the plugin give you more information?

In the past, I’ve found that disabling all plugins is a faulty debugging method that causes more problems than it solves, so I won’t be doing that.

Hi Julie,

I’m having the same problem as you, and have reverted to 1.6 – it made no difference.

I wonder if you’d be interested in sharing your list of plugins – that way we can figure out which ones we both use and narrow down the issue that way.

Hi lklawless,

Thanks for getting in touch! I have a rather long list of plugins (60+), but I wouldn’t mind starting by listing those which could potentially have an effect.

However, I don’t think the problem is with plugin compatibility. I’m sure something is wrong with this plugin’s code. Check out what I wrote at comment #5 above if you haven’t already. Even after manually editing the database, the plugin empties the data from the associated table cell upon saving a post, even if no changes were made to the category permalink selection. Which means that after manually updating the database, a post can’t be edited at all without manually updating the database again to retain the permalink.

This is the issue I believe needs to be addressed, and I don’t see how it can be related to plugin compatibility since all the other threads reporting compatibility issues mention different plugins. If there are compatibility issues with that many plugins, none of which existed before this plugin introduced the recent major update, then this plugin is the problem.

But if you think sharing our plugin lists would help anyway, then sure, I don’t mind…

Hi Julie,

I did read your earlier post and I looked at phpmyAdmin but didn’t have the same issue as you. I only found about a dozen category_permalinks, and they’re not blank. But the issues in the blog admin are exactly what you describe.

Since it seems like you and I are the only ones still having trouble, I figure it can’t hurt to see if we use any of the same plugins. I use more than 30, so I just took a screenshot of the folder: plugins

Thanks for sharing those details, lklawless. It confirms some new discoveries I’ve made — that I was wrong about the problem being with saving the values to the database! ??

That v1.6 didn’t work for you got me thinking. I checked the changelog, and that’s when WooCommerce support was added, so I reverted to v1.4 and everything works for me now.

Interestingly, the changes I was trying to make were indeed saved — I didn’t have to do anything at all once I reverted to v1.4 (I went through and checked every post I was trying to change). That’s why I think I was wrong before, and why I now think the problem might be with the rewrite rules added for WooCommerce support.

I don’t think this really resolves the issue, though. There may very well be others experiencing problems without knowing it. I never would have known if I hadn’t tried to make changes to that handful of posts…

In case this is still relevant, the only plugins we have in common based on your list are Akismet, Redirection, Wordfence, Relevanssi, and of course, this one ??

Hope v1.4 works for you, too! Though I do hope we won’t be stuck with an older version for too long…

Shoot. Even 1.4 doesn’t work for me – there’s still no option to set the permalink, though all of the ones I previously set are still ok.

Glad it worked for you though! ??

Crappy!!! I hope you get it worked out. Hopefully Jordy and Yaniv will get back to you with some ideas, because it seems obvious to me that something went wrong with the transition to supporting WooCommerce…

Hi Julie,

Great to hear that v1.4 is working for you. That’s why Iv’e suggested downgrading as the different versions of the plugin work differently.

Now that we know that this version works for you and we know the changes that we’ve made between versions – we can better understand what needs to be fixed.

Thanks,
Yaniv

Hi Yaniv,

Thanks for answering my “how/why” question even though I got things worked out. I appreciate the explanation ??

I hope I can ask you the favour of updating this thread once you send out a new update with a fix. Since I’m using v1.4, I’m already getting a notification to update to the current version, so I won’t know if you send another update…

Also, just a note on the “interesting behaviour” I mentioned before… For two of the posts I was trying to change, the changes weren’t saved like all the other ones once I reverted to v1.4. I had to manually save them again, and it worked. I just thought it was strange that these two posts didn’t behave the same way as the others, and I thought maybe you’d like to know about that…

Cheers!

Hi Jordy and Yaniv, just wondering if there has been any progress on this issue? I’m still stuck at version 1.4, which is obviously not ideal…