Duplicate, flattened categories using link-library-cats

I have the same issue. Reported on Github. https://github.com/ylefebvre/link-library/issues/17

Reported here at well: https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/17267

Still broken in 7.4.1

First off, there is no need to indicate that an issue that you raised is still issue when a new version comes out if that issue was not listed in the changelog of the plugin:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/link-library/#developers

If it says nothing about the issue, then nothing was done in the new version to address that issue.

Now, I see that there are many on here mentioning this issue. In the case of @digihulpdienst , he/she provided a configuration file for their library. Looking in that file, I see that around 30 categories were selected to be displayed by that person’s instance of Link Library. Unless all of the selected categories are all at the same hierarchical level, then this will lead to duplicate categories to be displayed.

When you render a list of link categories, or a list of links, the plugin goes through the list of selected categories and consider them to be top-level categories, then if these categories have children, it goes through these children. Plain and simple.

@slabbi, @khatchad: Did you also select categories from different hierarchical levels in your library configuration?

Thanks for your reply Yannick.

Some of my categories have subcategories, but not all of them.

Do I understand correctly that the issue will not be solved? Because that means I will have to manually create the links list per top level category, right?

Best regards,
Erik (he/him)
@digihulpdienst

This is a regression, BTW. It worked correctly in a previous version. Though, I’m unsure if the previous version is that of the plugin or WordPress.

WordPress proper never offered such advanced capabilities to display links. While Link Library was augmenting the original link system in its first versions (1.0 – 6.0), it grew into its own with its own custom post type in version 6.0.

On github, some mentioned that this broke in 7.3.x, but the logic that queries categories and displays them has been the same for a very long time.

Now, what I am trying to understand is what users expect to have happen when they setup their categories in a hierarchy, but then only go in and select some categories in different levels of this hierarchy that may or may not be related?

For example, what happens if you select 3 x level 1 categories, then 4 x level 3 categories, but where only one is related to one of the first level categories?

Hi Yannick,
you can check the links here:
https://8bit-museum.de/sonstiges/links/
The first links are sub categories.

It worked for a very long time so there was definitely a change. Is it safe to downgrade, so no config is overwritten? If so I can go back until I find a version that works, so we see when the functionality broke.

You should have received the complete configuration from my site now. HTH

Hierarchical categories broke in 7.3.16. In 7.3.15 hierarchical categories works fine.

Replacing the file render-link-library-cats-sc.php with the file from 7.3.15 fixes the problem.

Thanks?@slabbi?for identifying when the problem was introduced. The issue is now corrected in version 7.4.7.?@khatchad?and?@digihulpdienst, please try the new version and confirm if this also resolves your issue.

The problem is not completely solved in the update of 2022-12-17

link-library-cats settings=”1″ gives the cats list as expected, so that works fine

link-library settings=”1″ is still producing an additional second set of second level links at the end, as if they were first level links

This is the page where it occurs: https://www.natams.nl/links-with-error/

@digihulpdienst : The problem that I resolved a few days is a problem that was introduced is an update this summer.

The problem that you are asking about now is the problem that I explained a week ago. You are selecting both top-level categories and sub-categories to be displayed in this instance of Link Library, and have selected to display sub-categories. This creates the display that you are seeing here. To avoid this, you would need to have a clear hierarchy of all of the categories that you want to show on this page, then only select the top-level category and choose to display all sub-categories of this top-level parent.

The problem with selecting categories from various levels is that a user may or may not always select all categories that are part of a hierarchy. They might select only top-level categories, and only categories that are at the third-level of the hierarchy. This does not really make sense in terms of rendering them on-screen.