Wiki Categories vs WP Categories

Hi rasoulezzat,

There may be some confusion caused by my using the term TOC in several different ways.

You can create a TOC page. On that page you can put wiki links or any other text or content you want. You would not use the TOC shortcode in that page.

This page has a screenshot of my TOC page and some discussion about it:

https://www.davidmccan.com/wiki/special-toc-page/

The TOC shortcode is useful for using in the sidebar and for using in other wiki pages to have a table of contents. You could create a page and put the TOC shortcode in it, but not name it TOC.

On this page, for example, you can see the TOC shortcode embedded in a two column page on the left, and in the sidebar on the right using the Yada Wiki widget:

https://www.davidmccan.com/wiki/plugin-overview/

On the Frequently Asked Questions page of the wiki, the FAQs are a wiki category and the list was created using the TOC shortcode with the category “FAQs”:

[yadawikitoc show_toc="true" category="FAQs" order=""]

You should not have to create categories in the posts section. I just tried on my test site (localhost/wikitest) creating a wiki category and a posts category with the same name ‘desserts’ and they did not get mixed up. The wiki category page was:

https://localhost/wikitest/wiki_cats/desserts/

It only showed the wiki article in its list. The post category page was:

https://localhost/wikitest/category/desserts/

It only showed the post category item.

In your admin area, under settings/permalinks, do you have ‘Post name’ as the setting?

I hope something from my rambling above is helpful or gives a clue for you. If not, please let me know and we can investigate more.

Best regards

Thanks for your reply. Yes that makes sense now. It took me a few reads but I think I got it. Although the links you posted did not work for me.

I’m running into another problem, although it might be on my end. I know this isn’t part of the scope of the original question, but any time I visit a page with the yada wiki shortcodes, the server returns back a proxy error.

I made a Table of Contents page to test with (not named TOC but Table of Contents) and when the page has regular text, or is blank, the page will load fine. However, just by adding a shortcode of [yadawikitoc show_toc=”true”] the page will not load and gives me this error:

Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /table-of-contents/.
Reason: Error reading from remote server
Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at superpowerswiki.com Port 80

We are using 2 webservers behind an Apache Proxy. Again, everything on the site works fine until I load short codes. This is also the only WP plugin with shortcodes that I’m using that causes this error (we’re using many on this server). I realize this is outside the scope of the original question and possibly the support here, but I figure I’d ask in case the shortcode somehow relayed to some external server first that makes my proxy lose routing info. Just a guess though. Are you able to shed any light on this? It’s super bizarre. Thanks!

Hi rasoulezzat,

The shortcodes do not relay to any external server. What they do is lookup the wiki pages by title from the site’s database.

I am in the process of moving my site, but I think I got it back up and the link should work now. Sorry for the trouble.

https://www.davidmccan.com/wiki/plugin-overview/

The other two links were just examples from my test site so you could see the different URLs I tested.

So, you have a TOC wiki page, and in another wiki page called Table of Contents, you put the TOC shortcode? If you do that, it should load into the Table of Contents wiki page the content of the TOC wiki page. If there is no TOC wiki page then you would get an error, because you are trying to load something that doesn’t exist.

The URL to the Table of Contents page would be something like:

‘https://www.superpowerswiki.com/wiki/table-of-contents’

When you are editing your Table of Contents page, at the very top there is a link to ‘View’. If you click that link, what is the URL you go to?

I don’t have much experience with proxy servers in this type of context. WordPress stores its posts and pages in the database. I guess the two servers are using the same database or have some way to keep them in synch?

It does sound a bit bizarre. I hope I’ve been able to give you a clue for figuring it out or you otherwise track down the problem. Please let me know how you get on.

Best regards

Aaaah, yes yes yes.

So the proxy error was because (like you suspected) I was pointing to a TOC page that didn’t exist. I think part of my problem grasping it initially was I guess I expected the categories themselves to be auto populating, but instead the pages were populating under the categories. To accomplish this, I simply made individual pages for each category, put a TOC page specific to that category on each page, then on my “TOC” page I just added links to each of those category pages. That way the user sees contents (categories) and clicks each link to get to the pages list (TOC shortcode). It took me a while but now that it’s all up and going it seems like a very easy concept to grasp. I just had to read through it a few times.

Thank you for letting me know. I’m glad you were able to get it working.