Category items sorting and reordering problem

[jenniwoo]

HELP ME! Have mercy Joomla Developers and bug fixers. Reordering bugs for Categories, I am sure, are your fault and you must fix them soon. I cannot finish alpha-sorting and re-nesting my over 500 categories in my Joomla 3.7 version of cagreenideas.org, the latter still my LIVE J1.5 site. Only since Joomla 3.5.1 Update came out end-of 2016 could I migrate my temporary intermediate J2.5 site (usgreenideas.org/cagi-j25) to J3.5.1 then on to 3.7.4.

Sorry for the lengthy description below, but I know of no better way for you all to get the "bigger picture" of this Category items sorting and reordering problem that in my experience has gone on, albeit it less troublesome variations since J2.5.

Weeks ago on my J3.7.3 site I would reorder web link categories, very numerous in total as in > 200, press the "REORDER" icon at the top of the web links list. To my horror the answer page was Article Categories. However going back to the Weblinks Categories page I would find the selected weblink categories had been properly reordered.

Most recently I had more oddly troublesome problems with categories sorting and reordering related to the setting of the "list limits" parameter:

1. For weeks I could not get my J3.7.3 site, cagreenideas.org/cagi-j3x, to list more than 5 categories on a back-end Categories page. That was useless for reordering some sub-categories some of which had > 20 or even > 50 sub-category items in their parent category. I have no idea what changed that limitation number or when or why.

2. By trial and error I eventually reset the System->Global Configuration->Site-tab page's "list limit" parameter, which was never set at 5, resetting it from the default of 20 to 50 or 100. Sometimes in J3.7.3 the setting had effect: List pages of Categories, Articles, Menus, weblink categories and links all had those correct numbers of line items in their back-end lists. However too often that was not the case and the list had only 5 items in it or 20, which again made reordering of longer portions of categories and subcategories impossible or extremely tedious.

BTW I have never yet had a reordering problem in a J3.4+ version of the cagreenideas.org/cagi-j3x site with reordering menu-items in menus, which I find odd if not also telling, and that knowledge would be helpful if I knew your code. This includes my J3.7.3 and most recent J3.7.4 versions of the cagi-j3x site, full URL of which is listed above.

3. For several days before end-of-July 2017 I had set the "list limit" in Global Conifig->Site-tab page from 20 to 50 and somehow this time the 50-limit "stuck"; the menus, articles and categories I listed in the back-end had that-many line items. Sorting or up-down arrow reordering of them or "change order number in an individual line-item" and click the reorder-icon at top-of-page reordered them correctly. Also batch ordering seemed to work on groups of 2+ categories or sub-categories.

I'm not sure when I upgraded from J3.7.3 to J3.7.4 but on 7/30/17 I changed the "list limit" from 50 to 100 and for the first time in months the 100-limit "stuck" also. For the next 24+ hours my article Categories list had 100 line-items on the list page and my reordering and re-nesting of categories in these longer lists (the latter making multi-level outlines of categories and sub-categories) proceeded rapidly.

Then came 7/31/17.

4. On 7/31/17 I changed the "list limit" from 100 to 200 and got lists of Categories with only 5 items in them. If at the bottom of the now 5-items-long Categories page I set 20 or 50 or more or ALL and pressed the adjacent Submit button, I got an answer page of Categories with 5 items.

This was also the case today 8/01/17. End of happy categories list sorting and reordering for me for I don't know how many more days or weeks or whatever.

Therefore I repeat: HELP ME
And if necessary find and fix this problem I assume must be in the core code and release a well tested J3.7.5.

Thank you. JGW, 72 y.o, sf ca usa

[jenniwoo]

Apparently the Hathor admin template "has bugs in it" which were causing the reordering problems I reported above.

Can Joomla email weekly bug reminders to us Joomla site developers? I never found a helpful answer in the Joomla forum topics. I only got the helpful answer today after weeks and months of struggling without help basically by accident.

[imanickam]

Apparently the Hathor admin template "has bugs in it" which were causing the reordering problems I reported above.

Be informed that the administrator template Hathor is no longer supported.

Following is the quote from the Release Notes of Joomla! 3.7.0 (https://www.joomla.org/announcements/re ... -here.html):

if you are using the Hathor backend template you should switch to the Isis template as your administrative template. The Hathor template is being deprecated and may not provide you with the ability to use all the latest features in Joomla! 3.7.