Excess "Uncategorized" posts in post2cat table

[cre8d]

I notice that I have a tonne of posts categorised as "Uncategorized" (as on the Manage Categories page), even though I don't have any posts categorised as "Uncategorized" any more (and indeed when you go to my category archive for uncategorised, there's no posts either). It's bothering me since I'm using a tag cloud plugin.

I had a look in post2cat table and the phantom uncategorized posts are listed in there. To see what these actually are, I went to

wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=

and entered in these post ids from post2cat where category_id = 1.

I got an error, of course, since the post wasn't there but I could see the preview window showing images that I'd uploaded to those posts which were once categorized with "Uncategorized".

Any idea what's going on? I'll try and investigate further.

[davidhouse]

This is more of a support request, not a bug report.

​http://wordpress.org/support

[cre8d]

I would say it's a bug if Wordpress isn't deleting the entry in post2cat?

[cre8d]

Ok, to follow up the bug is as follows:

• Create entry, categorized as "Uncategorized"
• Upload images for this entry
• Publish entry
• Delete entry
• Relevant post2cat lines are not deleted.

[davidhouse]

If you mean:

• The post2cat line for the deleted post isn't removed, worksforme.
• The post2cat line for the attachment isn't removed, invalid. It's not meant to be. Attachments are stored as posts, so they have their own post2cat lines.

I suspect you meant the latter so I'm closing with invalid.

[davidhouse]

As always, reopen if I was wrong :)

[cre8d]

I was referring to the post2cat line for the attachment isn't deleted, hence the category counts are incorrect.

[skeltoac]

Attachment categories are mostly unused, yes. The category counts should probably be refined to exclude Attachments.

[davidhouse]

Two possible solutions to this:

• We don't create post2cat lines for attachments
• We ignore post_status="attachment" lines for the purposes of creating category counts.

Personally I think the former would be more useful as there's really no point clogging up tables with useless rows.

[cre8d]

Agreed - the first solution seems best.

[nevans]

Here's a patch. When applied, Wordpress will not create post2cat entries for attachments. It will, however, attempt to delete post2cat entries. I thought it to be prudent to leave that in so Wordpress would clean up its mess...

Regards.

[ryan]

I think this is fixed now with the move to taxonomy and everything else.