UPDATE! (Sorry for the long post)
I’ve just posted some more products as a vendor. It turns out not all recently added categories appear at the bottom of the menu list. Some of them are embedded in the categories that are closest to them in alphabetical order.
Example:
I have a category named Camping & Outdoors. Yesterday, I created the parent category Car Accessories & Maintenance with a bunch of sub-categories in it.
Now Car Accessories & Maintenance, along with everything in it, is part of Camping & Outdoors, where Car Accessories & Maintenance is no longer the parent category to its “children.”
Weird!
But when I go to my admin account and enter Products > Categories, I see that everything is ordered the way it’s supposed to. The same goes for the Categories widget I’ve embedded in the sidebar on the front-end, which displays a dropdown list of all categories…. Everything there also shows fine.
So the problem lies really just within the pro dashboard, I think.
Possible explanation and narrowing down the problem:
I think the problem is that the plugin encounters some trouble when trying to index new categories. “New” being the keyword in this sentence.
Here is how I know this. Read it, it’s important!
Some categories on my site include identical sub-categories for different variables, like one category for male and another for female users (eg Men’s Clothing and Women’s Clothing). Naturally, such categories would have many identical sub-categories, like T-shirts, Jackets, Sunglasses, Shoes, etc.
The problem there was when a user listed a new product and attempted to index it under the relevant category. If you searched for the sub-category Jackets, the menu would suggest two identical names (ie Jackets, Jackets). Since their parent categories are not shown, vendors cannot really distinguish which one is for Men’s Clothing and Women’s Clothing.
I avoided that issue by including the parent category’s name in every duplicate sub-category on my site. The two sub-categories Jackets were renamed Men’s Jackets and Women’s Jackets, and so on. I did that with every identical sub-category.
Results:
The Category section in the product creator now displays all renamed sub-categories in the right order, but that only works with categories added up to a certain point in time. By that I mean old categories are displayed without any distortion, even when renamed, whereas adding new categories and renaming their children the way I described above, messes things up.
So I’m wondering, is it because the Parent category’s name is featured in the sub-category? Is this why the plugin is confused about indexing categories and their hierarchy?
Hope this long post helps you narrow down the problem. 🙂
Thanks!