Website – Do not have Permission

Try resetting your permalinks. Switch it to something else… save… switch it back… and save again.

Are you using custom permalinks? If so, go to Settings>Permalinks and just hit the “Save Settings” button (without making any other changes) and see if it fixes your problem.

To explain: This “forces” WordPress to re-write the custom .htaccess rules that control how permalinks work. If all your pages (but home) lead to a 404 error than it is usually because the necessary rules are missing in your new .htaccess file.

Thanks for come back chaps.
Yes i tried that and still fails. Played around with the permalink settings and still nothing.

I have been looking closely at my .htaccess file as i was wondering if the link between WP restore and the database may have been lost.

It must be a silly permission issue, surely?

Did you make a new database and restore that as well?

Check your database credentials in you wp-config.php file and make sure they are accurate with your current database.

No did not restore database.
What is held in the database, just user credentials?
If so, there were only 3 and now there is 1.
Is there a method of getting the wp-config.php file to just look at the new user i created and sort the permissions? Assuming thats it?

(sigh)…

Ummm… well, the database holds everything from plugin and theme options… to site settings… to security checks (nonces)…. to your individual post/page content.

The wp-config.php file is not related to a specific user. It’s the installation in general.

You probably want to google some on how WP interacts with the database. Lemme know if you need some links.

As Josh says, the database holds quite a bit. In fact it holds most of the information for your site, including all of the text that appears on all of the pages and post, plus more. The files have important stuff too, like images, uploads, your theme and plugins, but the good stuff is in the database

If your site has been hacked, you need to restore BOTH the files and the database. Hackers usually leave malicious code and back doors in your db, so you may actually end up reinfecting yourself if you just restore the files, as you have done this time.

Hope that helps. Google is a good resource for step-by-steps if you need to walk yourself through restoring your database after an attack.

From speaking to the ISP it would appear that the database is in good shape. If that is the case, what is the process for re-establishing the connection? Not sure what to search for in reference to this in google.

How was it that you were hacked then? If you were hacked, I would not trust the database (no matter what anyone says) and would restore from a known good backup, just to be safe. That includes both the files and the database, both from backup. It’s like rolling the site back in time a few days, and worth it just for the peace of mind.

Here’s a video (not mine) that does a good job of walking you through the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGtG7Ns0JEI

In all honesty I dont know. Going on what the ISP said.
Having said that I just had success thanks to your input.
I found an old database backup and restore it and it all started working.
However, there is another issue that you may now be able to answer:

1. The blogs I wrote have gone since i restored database. The database backup was from a while ago probably before the blogs were written. Is that it or can I do some clever jiggery pokery to extract data from one database into another?

Oh wow… you might be sunk there. I thought you had a recent backup. Ask your host if they maintain their own backups of your mySQL databases, and if so see if you can restore from whatever one is from just before you were hacked.

In other words, your backup, if it is an old one, only contains posts (or any data for that matter) from that time. It does not contain posts from any time after that backup was made.

So hopefully you can find a more recent backup. Sorry.