Category meta box: cannot see chosen subcategory if many items in subcategory

[landwire]

Hi there,
if you have many items in a subcategory then you are not able to see that selected item in the meta box in admin unless it's alphabetically in the top 10 (or thereabouts) of the subcategorie items. The meta box only shows the parent, you will have to scroll down a lot to find the child too.

In my eyes it would make sense to move the chosen items in subcategories directly under their parents, ignoring the alphabetical ordering, so that you are able to see what has been chosen.

[landwire]

Sorry could not edit ticket above! Obviously that only happens when you have a parent item AND subcategory item chosen. In my case I have countries as parents and cities as subcategories.
Sascha

[helen]

Hi @landwire - sorry you never got a response on this. I'm not sure I completely understand what you're looking for - do you mean that you want selected terms to show with hierarchy?

[landwire]

It's long ago, but I think I meant:

GERMANY
...
UK
...
USA (chosen parent)

Acity
Bcity
Ccity
Dcity
many other cities
...
New York (chosen child)

Chosen child (New York) cannot be seen in the meta box, because there are 40 or so other cities above it alphabetically.
I would prefer to see the chosen child, then all other cities alphabetically below it.
Is that clear now?

Not sure if you meant the same...

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to landwire:

Chosen child (New York) cannot be seen in the meta box, because there are 40 or so other cities above it alphabetically.

I could not reproduce that, we already display all selected categories at the top of the category list regardless of their hierarchy, unless you use a plugin like ​Category Checklist Tree.

[landwire]

Thanks! Yes, I am using Category Checklist Tree, which I find incredibly useful, when you have many terms in a taxonomy. Basically I would prefer wordpress to have this behaviour as standard, with the selected child directly under the parent, as described above.

But obvioulsy it might need to stay in plugin land, rather then core.

[landwire]

Ok, I deactivated CCT.

Now I have another problem, should I open a new ticket for it?

The parent and child are shown checked at the top of the box, but all other children of that parent are shown at the very bottom of the meta box - rather than under their parent, where they should be. Can you replicate that behaviour?

Thanks,
Sascha

[boonebgorges]

Hi @landwire - From a Slack conversation we had about this ticket:

The behavior being requested makes sense if you have checked terms only in a single hierarchy

[11:29]
But if you’ve checked a couple terms deep in the hierarchy, only the first will show at the top of the list, because the rest of the hierarchy will be ‘ontop’ with its checked brother

[11:30]
I think it would be fine to add a parameter that works with ‘checked_ontop’ to prevent hierarchies from being split - maybe ‘checked_ontop=altruistic’ - but I don’t think the default behavior should be changed

I think it's worth exploring whether it's possible to add a parameter to wp_terms_checklist() and the checklist walker that implements the behavior you'd like. Let's mark needs-patch and see if anyone cares enough to give it a shot.