All of a sudden we are not able to get to the admin panel of the website. Once I log into /wp-login.php it redirects me to the homepage or /wp-admin (depending on whether I visited wp-admin in logged out state or not)
WordPress version: 5.6.2
When it does redirect to /wp-admin
I see:
"Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page."
My first guess was that someone (maybe another user with administrator access) changed the roles. That wasn’t the case, I confirmed by looking at the database tables and the users had the wp_capabilities
that corresponded to being an admin.
Then I tried a bunch of other stuffs and none worked:
-
Created a new user using
wp_create_user
, added administrator capabilities, logged into that account from a private browsing window. Same. -
Went to the WordPress git repo searched for where "Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page." appeared, it did at many places so I added random string of text in some files to see exactly which one, it came from the file
wp-admin/includes/menu.php
in the last lines:if ( ! user_can_access_admin_page() ) {
-
I thought maybe
user_can_access_admin_page()
returned wrong information for some reason, so I used a page template to output some data like so
if ( current_user_can('administrator') ) { echo "Yes, admin"; } if ( user_can_access_admin_page() ) { echo "Can access admin"; } else { echo "Can't access admin"; }
Both returned true, yet the check on menu.php
fails. Not sure why.
-
Replaced wp-admin and wp-includes folder with fresh copies downloaded from WordPress org.
-
Renamed the theme and plugin folders to rule out the problem coming from a plugin or theme. Not the case, it still was the same.
-
Checked the error log of Apache2 as well as enabled debugging log for WP to look for any related error, none found. Nothing special, all the usual PHP notices that I have seen before.
-
At one point I noticed the SSL certificate expired a month ago (problem started yesterday though) so just to be sure I renewed that as well, still the same.
Anybody who have an idea on what might be wrong would be a great help!