Admin User and Menu Ganked

Let me start out by saying that I’ve been a web master since 2010. So I don’t know everything about php, MySQL, etc. but I’ve been around the block a few times.

So here’s the issue. I run AllisonGamblin.com as my personal site. I updated it to 3.6 within 24 hrs of the release. I use the Genesis Framework with the Lifestyle child theme. As of today, I lost all functionality on the admin side of the site. So I assumed it was one of the most recent plugin updates that caused the issue.

At the time I had 2 major ‘usual suspects’ in that I use BulletProof Security and W3C. I’ve had issues with both plugins on and off on a lot of sites. So I deactivated my plugins folder using the plugins.hold trick. This did nothing but 404 my site since the cache plugin code went nutz.

I then went through and completely removed the .htaccess files from root, admin, includes, and content files. I deleted all the cache folders and .php files wherever they were found and located.

I deleted the w3c and BPS plugin folders. Then I dropped the tables for both plugins. Basically, I burned it with fire.

But once I’d done all that, I started getting the error “”You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” whenever I tried accessing …/wp-admin . So I also double checked that my user was set to ’10’ and that my _capabilities was: a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;s:1:”1″;} . I also began getting 404s on any page that was a post or a normal page for the site.

So I created a new .htaccess file with the permalinks code:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /main/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /main/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

That ganked my entire site and I started getting 500 errors. So I deleted it.

At that point I thought I had done everything possible. That was the first 2 hours of my fight.

I finally contacted my host Webhostinghub.com. They went through it from their end and said that they didn’t see anything wrong. I then gave them my admin login info and they saw the ongoing issues. However, after checking my cpanel settings, they said they were very sorry but didn’t see any of the normal errors. Also, I should contact a wordpress developer leave them alone.

From there I went back into research mode. After several hours of spinning my wheels, I came across this answer. Basically it runs the ‘force-upgrade.php’ script that the user in the thread created. This was the magic bullet that got the site ticking again.

I was able to log in and get access to the admin side of the panel. Of course, this brings me to my current problem. I am obviously NOT an admin user.

My whole backside of the site is probably an editor level user, except that I’m missing most of the Admin level user links. I have ‘Profile’ instead of ‘Users’. Most of the normal Tools > *.* are missing. I don’t seem to have anything under Appearance > either, and I can’t change plugins settings. This includes adding, deleting, or editing plugins. Whenever I DO click ‘change settings’ on a plugin, I get “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”.

I’ve tried 3 different _capabilities codes to see if that fixes things. I’ve run the /wp-admin/maint/repair.php script and tried to force another DB fix. I’ve put the theme back to a wp default. I’ve re-re-installed WP from a fresh download. I’ve done everything except try to roll back the DB version [which I’m extremely hesitant to do as I’m not *THAT* strong of a MySQL user].

AS of now, I only have 1 user. I’ve exhausted all the options I’ve found in research, and I’ve managed to mangle my brain. H4lp.