We’ve built a custom Discourse theme where specific categories are displayed on the homepage using JavaScript. The script uses a predefined list of category names (as a comma-separated array) to fetch and render content from /categories.json. While most categories are displaying correctly, a few ar…

Not sure, but is this on /latest? Maybe it includes only categories that have topics in the topic list?

this is on latest discourse version and it doesn’t have any topics yet…I tried to create one dummy topic to one of the invisible category based on category ID , presuming it will invoke the categories json to list them but didn’t help & hence deleted the dummy topic as well..currently both categorie…

Sounds like I’m right. It would be silly to have latest send a bunch of categories that are not used on the outage. I think what I would do is either hard code the categories you want or put them in a theme setting. You could also make an Ajax call, but that would slow things down.

FWIW I’ve just created an empty category and I can see it in my /categories.json [The image is a JSON data screenshot showing a structure with categories, topics, and post details, including specific IDs, names, colors, and text values. (Captioned by AI)]

Right. I think if you get that endpoint it’ll have an categories but that the categories included in /latest are probably only those needed for those topics.

I’ve probably got confused. :melting_face: I thought it was about the /categories.json not including certain categories for an unknown reason and thought I’d try and rule out ones with no topics being the cause. Don’t mind me… :slight_smile: [image]

It’s not clear that I’m the one who was confused. And we can both be right. I’m still not clear what it was the the OP was looking at.

Thanks Pfaffman, JammyDodger. Since we’re using a customized theme, we attempted to add a few previously hidden categories to the homepage by appending them to the existing list of exposed categories in our JavaScript. We already have five categories displaying correctly using this method. However, …

[image] Steve_John: we attempted to add a few previously hidden categories to the homepage by appending them to the existing list of exposed categories in our JavaScript You might share your code, perhaps linking to github

Enabling the lazy load, resolved this issue to display the categories which was not visible earlier..Not sure, how it is related…However it implies that categories doesn’t have any permission issue..still haven’t found the root cause to resolve this issue.

Categories Missing from `categories.json` Despite Existing in the System (Custom Theme)

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JammyDodger May 10, 2025, 12:40pm 6

FWIW I’ve just created an empty category and I can see it in my /categories.json

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Categories Missing from `categories.json` Despite Existing in the System (Custom Theme)

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