Categories not showing up in dashboard

Did you add them to your menu?

They’re not showing up in the dashboard on the categories page. It’s a blank list. What do you mean about adding them to the menu?

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Am1YP.jpg

So you are trying to ‘add new category’ and when you look through your categories it is still blank after adding a new category? Or are you having problems viewing it on your website?

No categories are showing up in the dashboard. The parent dropdown also says “none”. However it says 3 categories exist if you look at the screenshot. https://i.imgur.com/Am1YP.jpg

You are filling out the Name and slug and pressing Add New Category?

Yes, also old categories are not showing up there which is the more pressing issue. Also if I try to add new posts or edit old posts, the list of categories is blank.

Hrmm, that isn’t good. Did this happen after doing something? Like updating or moving your URL?

I just found this as well. Check this out:

You need to edit a line in your theme’s header.php file.

1. In your WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance > Editor
2. On the right, under Theme Files, select the “Header” link (for the header.php file)
3. Do a search (CTRL+F) for “list_categories”
4. You should come to a line that looks something like this:

<?php wp_list_categories(‘title_li=&exclude=’ . $GLOBALS[asides_id]) ?>

(The stuff between the parentheses will vary by theme.)

5. Add “&hide_empty=0” (without the quotes) right before the last apostrophe (the ‘). (Basically, between these apostrophes is where you can add arguments. Arguments are separated by ampersands (&).

So in the above example, the edited line looks like:

<?php wp_list_categories(‘title_li=&exclude=&hide_empty=0’ . $GLOBALS[asides_id]) ?>

6. Click Update File and check your website. All categories should now show, whether they have posts or not.

Note: This may also add the dreaded “Uncategorized” category item. If you want to exclude that, find its category ID* (it’s probably “1”), and edit the line so it includes “&exclude=1” (assuming 1 is the ID) like this:

<?php wp_list_categories(‘title_li=&exclude=&hide_empty=0’ . $GLOBALS[asides_id]) ?>

* How to find the category ID: https://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-find-wordpress-category-id

Also, this link lists all the arguments you can add to the wp_list_categories function. https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories. For instance, the order_by argument allows you to customize the order in which the categories are displayed (e.g., you can sort them by their IDs to give you full control). By default, it looks like they’re sorted alphabetically

I’ll give it a try, thank you. It either just happened on it’s own or after I updated the last time and I just didn’t notice.

That line doesn’t show up in the header.php file of any of my themes. That seems odd, right?

I guess mine doesn’t either now that I look at it.

I looked a bit and it seems that one person got lucky after waiting day. But if this has been an issue for a while I would try this:

“This just happened to me for some 400 blogs I host. In my case, the issue was that my /tmp/ dir on my server, which is its own partition, was full. In my case, I noticed this by running df -h. Hopefully this helps someone else out!”

Yep, I’m having the same exact problem. AJohn did you get the df -h to work for you? I have no idea how to do that on my server.

However, if you just want to see your categories…then you can try my random fix.

I just added a new category (through the dashboard, not programatically) under one of the “hidden” categories which isn’t showing up in the dashboard. And for some reason, after a refresh, all the categories started displaying properly. Deleting this new just category that I just added doesn’t seem to “hide” all the categories again.

Hi,

Just wanted to add to this in case anyone else was having the same problem and neither of the above solutions worked for them either. I tried them both but it didn’t help.

So, instead, I just used the “search Categories” box to type a letter in there and then any category with that letter should show up, whereas before it was not showing. You can then delete them all and continue doing this until you have got them all.

Cheers,
Rob

I think that I am having the same problem, the above solutions do not seem to fit.

I can add new categories in the Admin menu but they do not display in the admin menu or as an option when creating or editing a post.

I can see older categories that were created some weeks ago, but not the new ones. New categories do not display when I search for them but I can view the page if I go directly to the edit page and manually change the the ID in the URL, ie: https://www.xyz.org/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=26&post_type=post, the category appears and is editable.

I can see all categories in the database in the xx_2_terms table.

Is this an issue of indexing?

I am using multisite. As far as I am aware, the only change has been that we went from a demo domain demo.server.org to xyz.org using domainmapping plugin. The server itself has not changed.

I just tested another site on the same multisite install and new categories appeared as expected.