[Opserty]

There is a closing curly brace (}) missing from your while() statement. Also you don't need the single quotes around the 3 in [minicode]$columncount = '3';[/minicode]. Run

PHP Code:

var_dump($cats); 


and throw in an echo statement into your while and see if you get any output. Also run var_dump() on $counter to see if it is changing.

Maybe check that you are getting results from the database first.