wp_category_list not working

Upfront, the function get_category_children() is marked “depricated since WP 2.8”. Though even if it seems to be working you can’t rely on that.
Assuming $this_category->cat_ID is containing a valid ID you could do this:

$kitten = wp_list_categories(
  array(
    'orderby'             => 'id',
    'show_count'          => 0,
    'use_desc_for_title'  => 1,
    'child_of'            => $this_category->cat_ID,
    'echo'  	            => 0
  )
);

if( !preg_match( '#no categories#i', $kitten ) ) {

  echo "<div class='ab-subcats' >";
	echo ' <h3 class="title"></h3>';
  echo "<ul>";
  echo $kitten;
  echo "</ul> ";
	echo "</div>";

}

If that’s still not showing anything you could also add var_dump( $kitten ); and check (and maybe post) what wp_list_categories() is returning.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. wp_list_categories is returning “No Categories”, even though there are children categories for it to display. Even without the get_category_children() call, I know that my test case has child categories.

Thanks again.

So the next variable to check would be var_dump( $this_category->cat_ID ); Does it show a proper ID?
You can cross check manually in the admin backend under posts/categories and hover over the category names. The links would contain something like &tag_ID={category_id}

If $this_category->cat_ID does show an existing ID you could also use get_categories() as an alternative to wp_list_categories which then will/should return an array instead of an HTML formatted list.

$kitten = get_categories(
  array(
    'type'      => 'post',
    'child_of'  => $this_category->cat_ID,
    'orderby'   => 'id',
    'order'     => 'ASC',
    'taxonomy'  => 'category'
  )
);

Other than that I’m out of ideas (for now), sry.

Thanks, I will double check. I had a second site with the same code running and I just switched it to 3.5 and it is working fine, so there must be something else. Glad it’s something else. Thank you for your observations and I will keep in mind the deprecated code.

The function wp_list_categories is declared in wp-includes\category-template.php You could also copy the old function from your 3.4.2 installation, rename it to, say, wp_list_categories_old, then call this instead of wp_categories in your code and see if that’s returning the proper list.

Thank you so much for your attention on this Chris! I like your last suggestion and will try it out. That’s a clever idea.