vinnymckee

Thank you for the nice review! And thank you for the feedback. I can definitely add a screenshot showing how to drag and drop a page to a folder; that’s a good idea.

Hi @mswp1070,

Glad to hear it! And thanks for the info on the compatibility.

Hi @shirtguy72,

Yes, you can always set the color back to the original/default blue color.

If I can help with anything else, please let me know.

Thanks for providing a copy of the database, that helped a lot to troubleshoot this. Here’s what I found:

• Apparently WordPress allows terms to be shared across taxonomies. When this happens, there is only a single term record stored in the database that’s linked to both taxonomies.
• It appears that, at some point, folders were created for posts with the same names as some of the post categories (e.g. Blog, News, Success Stories). For whatever reason, instead of being inserted into the database as their own term records (the normal behavior), they were cross-referenced to the existing post category terms. So instead of there being two terms for “Blog” for example, there was really only one that was linked to both the post and folder taxonomies.
• Those terms would be greyed out on the Posts > Categories page when Wicked Folders wasn’t active because WordPress couldn’t find the taxonomy for them (the folder taxonomy is only registered when the plugin is active). WordPress uses the latest taxonomy that was cross-referenced with the term (stored in the term_taxonomy table) for creating the edit link and it doesn’t create one if the taxonomy is missing.
• When Wicked Folders was activated again, the categories would no longer be greyed out but clicking the link to edit one of the categories would lead to an error “You need a higher level of permission. Sorry, you are not allowed to edit this item.” This happens because WordPress only allows editing terms where the taxonomy’s show_ui setting is true and, similar to the last bullet, WordPress was checking the latest taxonomy associated with the term (in this case the post folders taxonomy).
• Additionally, WordPress would return an ambiguous_term_id error under the hood with the message “Term ID is shared between multiple taxonomies” when checking permissions.

I’m at a loss as to how the terms ended up in this state. I confirmed that adding a new folder with the same name as an existing category creates a new term record. That is the expected behavior and wouldn’t lead to these issues.

I’m sorry this happened but I’m glad it sounds like you found a solution. Out of curiosity, how were you able to delete the categories? When I deactivate Wicked Folders, those categories are greyed out and I’m not able to delete them.

That’s really strange. Is there any chance you could send me a copy of your site’s database so I could try setting it up in a test environment? You can use our contact form to send a link if you’d like.

There’s no code in Wicked Plugins though that modifies the post categories. Even if there were, the plugin would have to be active for the code to run so deactivating the plugin would restore the normal behavior.

It does appear that WordPress core will show a category as greyed out if the user doesn’t have the edit_term permission for the term. So I wonder if this could be a permissions issue?

Does it change anything if you create a new administrator account and log in with that account?

No problem, that’s a pro feature so just wanted to rule it out.

Going back to the greyed-out categories, you mentioned that’s what happens when you turn off every plugin, is that right? Is that including turning off Wicked Folders?

If so, the only other place I can think of that behavior coming from would be the theme (or perhaps a “must-use” plugin but that seems unlikely). Can you try switching to a default theme such as TwentyTwentyFive to see if that changes anything?

I’m just thinking this issue could be related to whatever is causing the categories to be greyed out in some instances so trying to narrow that down.

Thanks for the screenshot. That’s really strange. Would it be possible for you to try temporarily deactivating all other plugins to see if the behavior changes?

I’ve never seen this happen before and can’t seem to reproduce it on my end so I’m wondering if there could be a conflict with another plugin.