Hello, I have a situation where my test account has uploaded 2 listings and I see them on the main website too. But when I goto /account/listings/, I don’t even see the Listings menu on the side bar, i just see Settings and Sign Out. I am not able to edit or view how many listings I posted from my account settings.
I found a workaround which fixes the issue temporarily that is, going to admin panel from my main wordpress admin account, and clicking the publish button on the test user’s listing. After doing this, the listings menu then shows on the test account settings.
Yes I do have manual listing approval enabled, however, both the listings from test account are already published so they should atleast see the listings menu on the account settings.
I’ve experienced similar issues with another menu item myself. Can you confirm:
if you’re using a theme provided by HivePress?
if you’re using any third-party plugins?
and/or, have made any customisations to your site?
In most cases, you’ll find temporarily deactivating any third-party plugins or customisations will restore functionality, and, therefore help you identify which plugin or other customisations are causing conflicts.
To help narrow down the thing actually causing the menu item to dissappear, you can try reactivating any third-plugins one by one afterwards.
I hope this helps!
Cheers,
Chris
PS: I’m not HivePress staff; just trying to help. The staff don’t usually work weekends, but they’ll likely reply on Monday, if you’re unable to resolve things before then.
If the issue still persists, could you please answer the questions Chris shared? This will help us investigate the issue and provide more effective assistance.
Thank you ChrisB and kseniia for the prompt response.
I am using ListingHive theme
I am using a lot of thirdparty plugins
I did customize my site with tons of custom snippets and childtheme functions
The problem is, I am not able to replicate the same bug/issue because whenever a listing is submitted/updated, it makes the Listing menu appear in account settings. So new accounts posting listings won’t have this issue.
My main question is, why did it disappear in the first place? Was it because I submitted listings from test account months ago, and then updated hivepress/wordpress to new version and somehow that caused it?
Is there a snippet available to make those menus (Listings, Membership, etc.) appear at all times even if a user doesn’t have a plan or listings yet? This would eliminate the issue and it would be much neater for user experience for example:
If user doesn’t have any listings yet, there should be Add Listing button inside that menu
If user doesn’t have any membership plan yet, there should be Plans menu to select from.
In this case, I don’t think there is a bug, just a different expectation. I believe that by default, many of the HivePress user account menu items are displayed only when there’s logical information for the pages to render. E.g the ‘Favourites’ menu item only appears for a User after they have clicked the heart icon on any particular Listing to add it to their list of Favourites. Similarly, you will find removing all favourited Listings will cause the ‘Favorites’ menu item to disappear again.
This is how HivePress has currently been designed to work. However, with some customisations, I believe what you describe is possible. Essentially, force all menu items to always display and if there’s no logical information to show on the page, provide a link or text that explains this/prompts action.
For example, the ‘Favourites’ page could display something like: “You haven’t added any Listings to your list of favourites yet. Once you click the heart icon on a listing, you can return to this page to find the Listing more easily next time.”
I don’t personally use the manual review feature myself, but if the Listings remain drafts until approved which then causes the menu item to appear. This is likely playing a part, too.
I think the larger request is probably beyond the scope of HivePress staff support, but they can likely provide developer guidance and by using AI or hiring a HivePress-vetted Expert you should be able to implement this, if you’re not comfortable coding yourself.
Thanks for the explanation ChrisB, I appreciate it.
That makes sense. If the HivePress team could provide some developer guidance on how those account menu items are generated, that would be really helpful. I’d be happy to create a custom snippet that keeps core items like Listings and Membership visible at all times and simply displays an appropriate empty state or call-to-action when there’s no data yet. I think that would provide a much better user experience.
Also, I just came across your Menu Enhancer plugin for HivePress and installed it. So far I’m really liking it!
I’m sure Kseniia or Ihor will help clarify things soon.
I’m somewhat interested in implementing this myself, but my work is quite full-on at the moment, and I’m in the midst of updating and developing another handful of custom extensions, so I don’t have time to help with this further at the moment. Sorry!
I’m keen to see what you come up with, though, and it would be appreciated if you would consider sharing your solution with the community.
And, that’s great to hear! Thanks for checking it out. If you run into any issues, find bugs or think of an awesome new feature, please do drop a reply in the relevant topic!
This was playing on my mind and I couldn’t resist having a quick go at coming up with a solution, and so, I’m excited to share my latest plugin that aims to help achieve this.
Persistent Account Menu for HivePress
What it does is display all of the role-relevant Account menu items that a user or Vendor can usually activate conditionally - by default, instead.
The resulting page they land on shows an icon, brief description and a relevant button link. Here’s an example:
I believe this topic can be considered resolved, but I just wanted to add some additional context.
By default, many menu items in HivePress appear only when there is relevant content available to display. We designed it this way to keep the interface clean and simple for most use cases.
For example, there’s no need to display the Listings section for regular users if they’re only browsing the website, the section appears once there’s at least one listing available. This also follows the default vendor registration flow: if direct vendor registration isn’t enabled, a user becomes a vendor by submitting their first listing, which then changes their role to a contributor (vendor).
The same logic applies to other sections:
The Dashboard section is displayed only for vendors, as it’s intended for payouts and vendor-related actions.
In most cases the Memberships section doesn’t need to be shown to all users if your monetization model is focused only on vendors purchasing plans for listing submissions or additional features.
We understand this default behavior won’t fit every use case perfectly, and it’s completely valid to want a more tailored setup depending on your specific project. This is exactly why HivePress is built to be flexible and easy to customize. You can try using our AI assistant (or another AI tool) to help make adjustments. For more complex customizations, you’re also welcome to reach out to one of our experts.
For this particular case, you can customize the user account menu using the hivepress/v1/menus/user_account hook.
@ChrisB’s Persistent Account Menu plugin solved the original issue of the menu items disappearing, so thanks to him for putting that together!
However, after testing some more, I realized the underlying problem still seems to exist. The Listings menu is now always visible (which is exactly what I wanted), but the actual listings themselves are sometimes missing from the page even though they are published and visible on the frontend of the website.
They appear correctly on the website, but under Account settings → Listings, the page is empty. If I go into the WordPress admin and simply press update on one of the already-published listings they immediately reappear in the account dashboard.
This makes me think the issue isn’t related to the account menu anymore, but rather to how HivePress associates or queries listings for the account page.
Perhaps it has something to do with database? Did updating Hivepress plugin cause it? I am confused what could be causing this.
Would the hivepress/v1/menus/user_account hook only affect the menu, or is there another hook or function responsible for retrieving the user’s listings for the Account → Listings page? Any developer guidance on where that logic lives would be greatly appreciated, as I’d like to understand why republishing a listing makes it appear again.
In order to determine whether this is a HivePress-specific bug, could you please try disabling all customizations and third-party plugins temporarily, to help us confirm whether the issue originates from the core plugin or one of our extensions? I’ve also tried reproducing this locally on my end, but haven’t been able to so far.
It might also help to test this on one of our demo sites, just to see if the same behavior occurs there https://listinghive.hivepress.io/.
Since this touches on one of the more fundamental directory features, we’d typically expect other reports if it were a widespread core issue, and so far, we haven’t received similar reports from other users. This makes us think there could be a conflict with a third-party plugin or a specific customization, rather than the core functionality itself.
If there is indeed a bug on our end, we’re absolutely interested in getting it fixed, but we need to first confirm it’s actually caused by our products, rather than a third-party plugin or custom code, so we can address it accurately.
I am trying to reproduce the issue, but that’s what’s making it so difficult to troubleshoot. Once the listings appear in the account dashboard, they tend to stay there, so I can’t consistently reproduce the problem.
For example, today I logged into my WordPress admin after 2 days to work on the website. When I checked the frontend Account → Listings page, all of my listings were missing. I then went back to the WordPress admin and, as a test, simply disabled one of my custom code snippets. It wasn’t related to listings at all, it was just a small CSS snippet. After refreshing the frontend page, all of the listings suddenly reappeared.
This makes it difficult to determine whether my custom code actually causes anything or if the action of saving changes/refreshing something in the admin somehow triggers the listings to load correctly again. Since the listings are now visible, I can’t reproduce the issue anymore, for now atleast, until they disappear again.
I’ll keep trying to narrow it down and report the findings here. As of right now, the only thing I noticed/worth reporting is that making any changes, as small as rearranging menu bar items in the admin panel makes the listings reappear on the front-end. What causes them to disappear is the main question/problem.
P.S. I was not able to test this issue on the demo site because upon signing in there, the demo account didn’t have any listings to begin with so I wasn’t able to see whether the issue exist or not. I did submit test listing which made the listings appear in the account settings, but that’s normal behaviour after freshly submitted listing.
Update: I wanted to provide an update on the troubleshooting I have done so far. With the help of AI, I checked the database directly and confirmed that the listings exist correctly (post_type = hp_listing, post_status = publish, correct post_author, and all taxonomies/meta data appear normal). The issue only affects the frontend Account > Listings page while the listings remain visible publicly and in the WordPress admin panel.
I also confirmed this happens across multiple subsites in my WordPress Multisite setup and affects regular test account, not just my admin account. Updating any listing from the WordPress dashboard immediately makes all missing listings reappear in every subsite, but after some time/inactivity the issue returns. I disabled/checked caching-related areas (LiteSpeed object cache is already off), reviewed my custom snippets, and did not find anything modifying HivePress listing queries.
At this point, I suspect something within HivePress’s internal model/query/cache layer or an extension interaction may be involved. Since HivePress’s source code is not something I can fully inspect, I’m not sure what specific component is responsible for building the Account > Listings query or what gets refreshed when a listing is saved. Could you please advise what internal functions/hooks/models are involved in this page so I can continue debugging, or help identify what could cause the user listings query to temporarily return zero results despite the listings existing correctly?
Just jumping in to say you can try disabling the HivePress cache using the snippet below to rule that out, but this certainly doesn’t sound like typical behaviour.
Thank you ChrisB. I have added this snippet and cleared cloudflare/server cache as well. I’ll wait for it to see if the listings disappear again or not.
Based on the description, and the fact that the issue is temporarily resolved when you save one of the listings, I assume this is something related to HivePress cache. The listing count, used to detect if the user’s listings page is empty, is calculated and cached here hivepress/includes/components/class-listing.php at master · hivepress/hivepress · GitHub Due to the multisite installation and maybe a combination of plugins/caching, this count is most likely saved as zero, causing the described issue.
The code snippet suggested by Chris above should resolve it, and if you use another cache plugin, it’s ok to leave the HivePress cache disabled.
I added the snippet provided by ChrisB to one of my subsites few days ago to test it, and as you mentioned, it seems to have solved the issue. The listings have stayed visible in the Account > Listings section without disappearing again.
I’ve now added the same snippet to all the other subsites as well. I’ll keep an eye on it over the next few days to make sure the issue doesn’t come back, but so far it looks like that was indeed the cause.
Thanks everyone for the help, I really appreciate it!
