Unable to edit for specific users/roles

I have selected a specific user in the top horizontal menu but when I rearrange the order of items the changes are made to all users/roles.

That’s by design. Menu permissions are the only thing that’s different for different users/roles. All other settings – like menu order, menu titles, icons and so on – will be the same for everyone.

I did not make any changes to the Administrator level menu (aside from the ones that carried over when I edited the Editor & Shop Manger roles) yet this was the only user level affected by the permissions error.

Do these users have multiple roles? For example, maybe some of the Administrators also have the Shop Manager role (which would be pretty common)?

The reason this matters is that the plugin gives higher priority to custom/modified permissions. This means that if you explicitly hide a menu item from Shop Manager but leave it unchanged for the Administrator role, a user who has both of those roles won’t be able to access that menu – the custom “hide” setting will take priority.

You can work around that by unchecking the problematic menus for the Administrator role and then re-enabling them again. That will make them count as having custom permissions.

Thank you for you quick reply.
No problem about the menu order/titles etc being the same, that’s not a problem, just thought I would mention it in case it was part of the issue.

I had another look and found the issue seems to be stemming from when I edit for a specific user. I wanted to create a custom menu for the client to provide easy access to specific pages directly from the menu (rather than having to go through the full pages list). When I created these page links in the clients menu all other users were locked out of those specific pages. I did try checking/unchecking these menu items on the Administrator level but still had permission errors.

What I did end up doing was creating the custom menu links for all users, then just unchecking items in the client’s menu that were not required. This means my admins got custom menus too (which they didn’t need) but at least everyone has access to the correct areas now.

While this is an ok solution this time, I would like to find the reason for the issues I had when editing for a specific user as this is a feature that is very useful and it appears to not be working correctly.

I wanted to create a custom menu for the client to provide easy access to specific pages directly from the menu (rather than having to go through the full pages list). When I created these page links in the clients menu all other users were locked out of those specific pages.

So you had a custom menu for the client and a built-in/default menu for other users? In other words, there were two different menu items with different permissions that both led to the same page?

That kind of thing can cause problems because its ambiguous which permissions should take precedence when somebody tries to open that page. The plugin has no way to tell which menu item the user clicked – the menu URLs are identical – and it has to pick one set of permissions (= one menu item) to use. In this case, it apparently picked the custom menu that only allows one specific user.

One way to deal with that would be to use the “hide without preventing access” feature. It’s the toolbar button that looks like a rectangle with a dashed border. You can use this button to hide the selected menu without changing its permissions.

For example, for the client menu you could do something like this: set it up with whatever items you like, but leave the items enabled for all roles/users that will need access to those pages. Select the custom menu, switch to “All” and click the button that I mentioned. Then switch back to the user view and click the button again. Result: Nobody else except that user can see the menu, but everyone who has it checked can still access the page by using other menus.

I’ve been reading this post and very useful, but how do I edit more users other than the regular users, such as Admin, Editor, Contributor, etc.
I-m able to edit my current user, which is Admin and then another user I was able to choose. But when I try to edit and add another user by clicking Choose Users.. and try the function ‘Search and hit Enter to add a user’, no other user is displayed. I tried another user I have and it doesn’t appear.
I’m also using the Pro version but can seem to figure this out.

It sounds like there might be an error or a plugin conflict that’s preventing the “Choose users” screen from working correctly. Are there any recent messages in the PHP error log? How about the JS console in the browser (see: how to open the console)?

I did have some probs earlier this week with a msg error displaying whe I tried to update the pluing with ….’could not create directory for Admin Menu Editor Pro′….But I got it fixed with the hosting, expanding PHP support.
Checking out the JS console, what should I look for as a problem? Can’t seem to find the console when I click CTRL + SHIFT + J on chrome.
Any pointers?

Usually pressing that key combination immediately opens the console. Does something else happen when you try it?

If it opens something else, look at the top of the developer tools panel for a list of tabs: “Elements”, “Console”, “Sources” and so on. Click on “Console”. The console might start out empty; if that happens, reload the page and try using the “choose users” option again.

As for what to look for: any message that’s colored red or that explicitly mentions errors or exceptions.