I have categories on the front end that are not showing in the admin area

General General Questions
1

I have a bunch of categories showing on the front end of my site, but many are not showing in the admin/products/categories area. What do I do to locate and remove these categories?



Thanks.



V 2.2.4

2

If they do not exist in the admin because you have removed them, then the likely cause is they are still in the blocks cache. Clear the cache by appending your admin URL with ?cc like so:

yourstore.com/youradmin.php?cc
3

[quote name='StellarBytes' timestamp='1362006527' post='156563']

If they do not exist in the admin because you have removed them, then the likely cause is they are still in the blocks cache. Clear the cache by appending your admin URL with ?cc like so:

yourstore.com/youradmin.php?cc

[/quote]



Did not work…

4

I have 44 categories on the front page, that should not be there and they are not showing in the admin area.

5

Are you talking about the site as per your username? That site only has 14 categories in the “Categories” menu block on the left-side, all of which have at least one product in the category.



If you are seeing differently and you are talking about the feniexstore.com store, then I suggest you clear your web browsers cache.

6

[quote name='StellarBytes' timestamp='1362009921' post='156569']

Are you talking about the site as per your username? That site only has 14 categories in the “Categories” menu block on the left-side, all of which have at least one product in the category.



If you are seeing differently and you are talking about the feniexstore.com store, then I suggest you clear your web browsers cache.

[/quote]



No, not feniexstore.com. coderunnerspse.com is the site with the problem.

7

Thanks for checking…

8

They're all valid categories, or at least valid SEO names.



In Design>Blocks



Check the Content tab for the block which controls your Categories sidebox. Is it set to dynamic or manual?



Are you positive these categories do not exist in admin Products>Categories? The SEO names (ie. category-name.html) for all the “empty categories” (eg. the many duplicates of Accessories which have no products) definitely exists.

9

They are set to emenu. Not sure what that means.

10

They do NOT exist in the admin area. Thanks for the help so far…lol

11

The Emenu is the flyout menu, which allows you to display subcategories when you hover over the root category. It'll be displaying all categories it finds in the database.



I would temporarily disable the SEO addon, view the front-end and see what the URL's are. You'll find the category_id=X in the URL. Go to the admin, go to Products>Categories, click Edit on any Category, then substitute the ID in the URL for an ID you do not think exists in the admin which you found on the front-end.



They are definitely categories, as they display the “No products” message which is only included in the categories templates. Unless of course you've altered some other template(s) to include this…

12

Ok, thanks. That seems to be the only way to locate these categories. It shows {category} as the location on the tree, I have never seen that before.

13

I have to change the location to root level in order to for them to show in the admin area and then delete them.



Thanks again for your help.

14

The only time I have seen something like that happen is when, for example:



cscart_categories ← a category_id exists here with a parent_id



Then either:



cscart_category_descriptions ← no record exists for the above category_id

OR

cscart_categories ← the category_id for the parent_id is deleted directly from the database.



Have you been editing the database tables directly, or importing directly? Seems something is amiss with your data. Glad you found a solution in the end though!

15

I actually partnered with a company that is supposed to integrate automatic updates of their product inventory and information. They must have an issue with their process. Hope that doesn't happen again.