The amazing people over at the pMachine (the company that creates Expression Engine) helped me figure out the problem. After posting about my problem in the support forum which was promptly answered by one of the lead programmers. After providing a few common suggestions that may have fixed the problem (they didn’t) he then offered to look at my blog for me. What amazes me is that we’re talking about a for-pay blogging engine….we’re talking about a pretty decent sized company, and one of the lead programmers just offers so kindly to just personally look at my blog. Needless to say about 20 minutes after he looked at it he figured out exactly what was wrong:
OK, I figured out what was wrong with your categories. For some reason, you had a lot of duplicated categories in your exp_categories table. And all the dupes had a group_id of 0. When I removed the dupes, the category list works correctly now.
Definitely would have never found that and/or fixed that on my own. In part because of this absolutely amazing service, I have decided to renew my non-commercial license for Expression Engine. I can’t imagine using a better product.
Wandering the Interwebs 