Randomly Disappearing Categories

[ironmoo]

My site only has four categories. When I first load up the site, only three of those categories show up. When I click on any of these categories, the category that was missing magically appears. What's really strange is that it doesn't happen every time, but almost every time it does happen, it is my 3rd category "Folk and Country" that is not appearing. Having searched the forums for a solution, I saw that people with the same problem solved it by disabling caching in the Admin. I don't think this is my problem because my caching is and always has been disabled. If you think you can help, check out:

 

www.countryhomeart.com

 

Your browser may or may not have a problem. I have seen the problem with Safari on my Mac, and Internet explorer and Firefox on a different computer.

 

I have installed the following contributions:

 

Purchase without account

Family Products

Free Count (quantity based free shipping)

Categories Box Images (possibly the culprit, but I still kind of doubt it).

 

I would greatly appreciate any help you can offer! Thanks!

[ironmoo]

If you visit my site and don't see the problem, please post a reply stating so, as well as your browser info. That would be most helpful to me. The best case scenario would be that nobody else notices the problem. Thanks!

[ironmoo]

I'm still not certain what exactly is causing the problem, but I'm thinking now that it's browser related. For anyone reading this, I recommend trying your site out with as many browsers as you can, to make sure it works well on each. I "solved" the problem by changing my categories infobox. For those interested, I changed my categories.php to the following:

 

<table>
<tr><td>
<A href="<?php echo tep_href_link('index.php', 'cPath=21'); ?>"><img src="images/clatre.jpg" border=0></a>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<A href="<?php echo tep_href_link('index.php', 'cPath=22'); ?>"><img src="images/floral.jpg" border=0></a>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<A href="<?php echo tep_href_link('index.php', 'cPath=23'); ?>"><img src="images/fac.jpg" border=0></a>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<A href="<?php echo tep_href_link('index.php', 'cPath=24'); ?>"><img src="images/holiday.jpg" border=0></a>
</td></tr>
</table>

 

This has an obvious downside that I can no longer change my categories by admin alone. This works for me because I have no subcategories and I don't plan on frequently and dramatically changing my product line. If you are interested in doing something similar, you can basically copy the above code and paste it in place of the body of catalog/includes/boxes/categories.php.

The first step, though, is to find out what the cPath is for each category. This can easily be done by just going to your website, clicking on any given category, then look at browser's URL. It will look something like www.yourstore.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=21&osCsid=9fg45as........

In this case the cPath is 21 for that category. Just configure the above code to match your needs.

[ironmoo]

Oops. If you want to use the code above, you'll probably need to take out the

</table>

 

that is at the end. I'm not exactly 100% sure why but that's how it's working for me.

[stevel]

Well, all you're doing is hiding the problem, not solving it. And if you've done that, we can't check it out for ourselves,

 

I tend to doubt it's browser-related, though it could be that your Categories Box contrib is incorrectly forming the category list. It would be useful, when you get a bad list, to view the page source and see if the missing category is in the HTML.

[ironmoo]

Yeah, I know that I didn't actually solve the problem, but it seems to have solved my problem. I'm curious to know what wasn't working, but I'm much more interested in launching my site at the moment. I am satisfied with my makeshift fix. I would love to get to the bottom of this problem for the sake of documentation and helping out other users, but I just don't have the know-how or time (school starts up again this week...) I do greatly appreciate your concern, though. Thanks and sorry I can't help more in eliminating this kind of problem.

 

Oh and by the way, I did look at the page source and the category was listed in the html, but I didn't take close enough of a look to see if it was done properly. If I have some free time I will load up a backup categories.php and post the resulting source html in this forum. If anyone is seriously interested in looking further into this problem, let me know, and I will make an extra effort to try to do that. Once again, thanks!