Some subcategories not working on custom portfolio sort

Question

I have a portfolio and we have added custom secondary sorting based on sub categories.

Client clicks categories and sub categories in backend.

On front end... user picks main category... a lit of subs shows up and they can further refine projects by them

Everything works great EXCEPT on a few sub category sorts for some reason. Also, we can't add a new sub category now and get it to work. Any new subcategory added and applied to a project returns no results.

Sub Categories not working are:

Forensic > Medical examiner/coroner

Forensic > New construction

Academic > New construction

Clinical > New construction

Corporate > New construction

Government > New construction Research > New construction

I checked and the slugs are all different names for the "new construction" instances...

Any ideas what would cause this? There are projects with these combos in the portfolio.

Answer 1

You can use below code: 

$args = array(
    'type'                     => 'product',
    'child_of'                 => 0,
    'parent'                   => '',
    'orderby'                  => 'term_group',
    'hide_empty'               => false,
    'hierarchical'             => 1,
    'exclude'                  => '',
    'include'                  => '',
    'number'                   => '',
    'taxonomy'                 => 'product_cat',
    'pad_counts'               => false
);

$cats = get_categories( $args );