Widget suddenly won’t display the chosen category when logged out

Dear @jamminjames .

I just checked this with WordPress 6.3 and can confirm that everything still works as expected. The categories are displayed in my development environment both as a logged out and as a logged in user.

I can imagine that another plugin or the theme is hooking into the category part and preventing it from displaying in the frontend.

Thanks for the response. I’ve tried everything, deactivating all other plugins, using another theme, removing all functions from our child theme, deleting caches, the problem still persists. Do you think you could take a look at the site? https://www.ecosacramento.net, home page, the widget is in the right column, with a title of “News Items of Interest”. It’s showing the same categories as the main column, but should be different. Thanks for any help.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by jamminjames.

I’m not sure what the issue is. First you wrote “…won’t display the chosen category when logged out…” which I understand the categories name won’t display.

Now you write “It’s showing the same categories as the main column, but should be different.”. Do you mean the categorie filter – widget settings section “Filter by category” – is not working?

Please share a screenshot of the settings of this widget an I try to reproduce this issue.

Okay, here are the screenshots.

The problem is not that the categories name won’t display. The problem is, I am filtering by category (sorry, thought that was understood) in two Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails widgets, one on the home page, one in a sidebar. I’m including screenshots of both from the backend, showing the category picked for each one. Then two screenshots of the front end home page with the sidebar. One is logged in, one is logged out. As you can see, when logged out, it is showing the same posts, when logged in, it is showing different posts, which is correct.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by jamminjames.

I double-checked this and can confirm that the Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails recognizes the category settings as expected. On an independent test envirement with WordPress 6.3 the category filter is working.

Unfortunately I have no idea what happens on your site if it doesn’t work.

As I wrote before, I assume there is code that modifies the post loop.

You can test it yourself on a demo site. Please follow the link: https://demo.tastewp.com/recent-posts-widget-with-thumbnails

Okay, I tried the demo site, and you’re right, it works there. It’s really hard to figure this out, though, because as I said, I’ve eliminated any place the bad code could be coming from. I’ve tried another theme (twentytwenty), deactivated all other plugins, removed our functions.php file from the child theme (but trying another theme should make that unnecessary anyway), removed the cache plugin, flushed browser cache, checked error logs, etc.

I assume settings are saved in the database, perhaps there’s some corruption there? What table is it stored in? I’ve tried re-creating the widgets, but maybe I should delete them from the db completely?

Any other ideas I could try to track this down? Thanks for your help.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by jamminjames.

Your issue is a website problem not caused by Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails. I’m sorry, but it’s beyond my ability to help.