Cannot Access Joomla backend properly- Cant see menu/toolbar

[jasondavis87]

Hello Everyone,

I'm trying to figure out how to get my joomla 1.7 backend to work and i cant figure it out for the life of me. I know that functionality is still there as i've gone to like /?option=com_installer & /?option=com_user, etc, but I cannot figure why i cant see the toolbar & menu bar to access them normally.

Attached i have 2 screenshots of the #__modules table for my website and what the administrator home page looks like.

I've looked at other forums, however none of the things the other ones have said to done have worked.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[ShMaunder]

Are you logging on with either a Super User, Administrator or Manager?

This normally happens when the user's group is not part of the 'Special' access level.

[jasondavis87]

I'm logging in as super user ...

I know when I did the site though I took the user groups down to 3 ...

Public
* Super users
* regular users

Prior to posting I did check the DB to make sure that the user was still a super admin and it was ...

I might have made a mistake in the permissions ... ill check ... what exactly do u think I should look for?

Thanks again for ur help

[ShMaunder]

Make sure your user is still mapped to the super users group first. Though you wouldn't have even been allowed to login to the backend if its not part of one of the admin groups.

Then have a look at the #__viewlevels table column 'rules' for title 'Special' - it should also contain the super users user group id.

For example my super users group id is 8. The contents of my 'rules' column is [6,3,8] for 'Special'.

[jasondavis87]

Hmm - I took a look at everything and i believe it all checks out - i took screen shots just to make sure:

For me the super admin is also group 8 - my Super user account is ID # is 42
Looks like that user is in the correct place. 1 Thing however, I dont see the word 'special' anywhere. I believe when i was installing the site, I renamed it to Members but i'm not entirely sure.

Thanks again for your help

[jasondavis87]

Wow, I spoke too soon. I was trying something random and figured mabye the "Invisible" group might be the issue. Changed it to [1,8,9] and its now working:

ran: UPDATE `#__viewlevels` SET `rules` = '[1,8,9]' WHERE `#__viewlevels`.`id` =3;

Any Idea's as to why its like this? Nothing is assigned to that access level?

Thanks

[ShMaunder]

Yes, your "Invisible" access level is by default called "Special".

Here are the defaults excluding Customer Access:
1 Public 0 [1]
2 Registered 1 [6,2,8]
3 Special 2 [6,3,8]

The "Special" access level which is linked to ID 3 (can be called anything), is the access level used for most modules in the Administrator backend. This is why you couldn't see anything at first.

[ivB]

Hi jasondavis87 and ShMaunder,

This morning I had the same nasty shock: the entire administration panel is blank! Exactly like your: only "View Site" and "Log out" are visible. I logged in as superuser and administrator but also as the result does not change.

Some things you said made ​​me come up with one thing: yesterday I was trying to set the permissions of the different groups and do some cleaning between the various groups, and I think I have deleted the group "special".
Could this be the reason for what happened?? If so how can I fix it??

[ShMaunder]

You've deleted the access level? Oh my, not sure how you've done that has an error should display with "You cannot delete the view access level '3:Special' because it is being used by content.".

My guess is you've the same problem as jasondavis87 in regards to unregistered admin groups in the 'special' access level. Can you get access to a database editor like phpMyAdmin, and take a look at your #__viewlevels table where #_ is anything but 'BAK'.

[ivB]

Hi ShMaunder,
thanks for the advice. Now I think I understood what happened.

By checking the table # _viewlevels I found that the remaining 3 fields were set to 0 by the system, ordering in, the rules also had different codes. Therefore, no one had permission to do (and not see anything in the backend).

I believe that this was not so much caused by deletion of the category "special" (probably Joomla don't warned me because I had removed the users from that group), but the fact that I had set the group "public" (all the choices) to "denied" in Global configuration...
Although I had then given permission to other profiles to do everything or something (and Joomla has perfectly saved these choices ...), because all group are children of "public", this must have caused that everyone could no longer access.
The strange thing though is that Joomla allows me to make this change without warning that it will create problems.
Would not it be better to eliminate the possibility of selecting "denied" because (as the guide for Joomla) anything done on the parent level (and the default "public" is the father of all) inhibits all child groups? Or add a warning ?

Now the back-end is accessible again.

[gooose]

Hi, i have the same problem, but i do not understand the solution ?

Can anyone please help with a step by step guide what to do to get acces to my admin again ?
This is the site:
[URL Removed]

Regards
Jan

[ShMaunder]

@gooose
This is due to a upgrade to 2.5.4. I was trying to investigate it, but I've got too much other work going on to chase it up. Here are the threads with the other people with the same problem http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=624&t=707494 http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=615&t=707758 - probably best thing to do is roll back to 2.5.3 via a backup.

p.s. remove the link from your post - edit: it has a security problem

[ShMaunder]

@gooose
See if this fixes it
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 4#p2782469

[gooose]

Thank yo so mutch... that fixes my problem, and it is all working again :-)

Mvh. Jan Bachmann

[tinocordes]

I messed up that user group as well. And this worked. Thanks!