Menu Editor: Child Product Categories are not nested under parents in the 'Add menu items' panel and are paginated incorrectly.

[sinars]

Summary of the Issue
In the Appearance > Menus screen, when adding WooCommerce Product Categories to a menu, the list of available categories under the "View All" tab is displayed as a flat, non-hierarchical list. Child categories are not indented or grouped under their parent categories. This forces users with many categories to search through multiple paginated pages to find and add related items, which is very inefficient.

Steps to Reproduce
Ensure you have WordPress and WooCommerce installed.

Create a significant number of Product Categories with a clear parent-child structure. For example:

Parent: لوازم بدنه (Body Parts)

Children: شیشه جلو (Windshield), شیشه عقب (Rear Window), کاپوت (Hood), گلگیر (Fender).

Create enough total categories to trigger pagination in the menu editor (typically more than 20).

Navigate to Appearance > Menus.

In the "Add menu items" panel on the left, expand the "Product categories" accordion.

Click on the "View All" tab.

Observe the list of categories.

Expected Behavior
Child categories should be listed directly underneath their respective parent category and should be visually indented to represent the hierarchy. For example:

[ ] لوازم بدنه (Body Parts)

[ ] شیشه جلو (Windshield)

[ ] شیشه عقب (Rear Window)

[ ] کاپوت (Hood)

This allows for easy selection of related items without navigating away from the parent.

Actual Behavior
All product categories, both parent and child, are displayed in a single flat list, often sorted alphabetically or by ID. The hierarchical relationship is completely lost. Due to pagination, a child category can appear on a completely different page from its parent, making menu management extremely difficult for stores with large catalogs.

The provided screenshot perfectly illustrates this problem, showing a flat list with pagination controls (1, 2, 3, ») at the top.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome to WordPress Trac!

Thanks for the report, we're already tracking this issue in #18282 and #19837.

The first ticket has a plugin to work around the issue until it's fixed: comment:25:ticket:18282.

Another workaround is also suggested in the description of ticket #47639.