Can’t access admin page

try a different browser and different device. be sure you are not signed in as any wordpress user.

Hi, Lisa. I’ve tried on both my laptop and my smartphone and on 5 different browsers. The issue occurs when I try to sign in as an admin: I know the credentials I’m typing in, I can see which user gets signed in and confirmed on screen; I couldn’t possibly be logged in as any other user.

I was wrong and selected 4.6.1 as my current version, but instead I have the latest one installed, 4.7.
In fact, this could be the very problem, as several users are reporting similar issues after the update.

Please, can someone help? My website is the website of the team I lead and is visited by several thousands people every month. I’m in a little bit of a hurry to solve this.

Do you have access to your web server’s file system?

1. Using FTP or whatever file management tools your host has provided you with navigate to the wp-content directory.
2. Once there locate and rename (do not delete) the plugins directory to plugins-old. Just that one directory and nothing else.
3. Try and re-login to your WordPress dashboard.

Let me know if that works.

Nuts, I missed that part.

I’ve deactivated all my plugins and also uploaded a brand-new version of the WordPress installation via FTP and created a new admin via PHP MyAdmin.

Do you have ssh access to your server and can run commands?

Hi, @jdembowski. Thanks for your help. That was what I had already done. I’ve just tried it again now: navigated to that folder with Filezilla, changed its name into “plugins-old”, deleted the cache in my browser, refreshed the login page, re-logged in. I can login to my profile (though I can’t even access my profile page); I’m “just” a simple user and not an admin.

I think there’s probably a better chance to create a new admin level account than sort out how to make your now user account back to an admin.

Please excuse me if I missed it or you’ve already explained that you do (or don’t) have that level of access but via ssh can you install wp-cli?

https://wp-cli.org/

The reason I’m asking is that with that on the CLI we could possibly sort it out quickly. But wp-cli is a little more advanced and may not be an option for you.

I’ve already tried to create a new admin user via PHP MyAdmin but that gets recognized as a simple user, too.

I don’t know what SSH is. Can you explain me how to install wp-cli via SSH?

If you don’t know what ssh is (and that’s fine) then phpMyadmin is the way to go. Unfortunately I’ve not tried it myself so I’ll ping some folks I know for assistance.

BRB.

1. Just to be complete: Make sure you backup your DB before trying this.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/WordPress_Backups

2. Then try the steps from this article.

https://codingcyber.com/change-wordpress-user-role-database-using-phpmyadmin-3390/

Give that a read a few times.

In the wp_usermeta table locate wp_capabilities entry. On my local installation it has this.

a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;}

My test installation is simple and the ID on the user is 1. If that’s the ID of your account and that is already that way, then don’t change anything. There may be something else going on.

3. Once that’s done then re-login and see if you’re back to having the administrator role.

4. If something goes wrong then restore the database from the backup in step 1.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup

Let us all know how that goes.

The whole point (and the absurdity of this situation) is I don’t even NEED to change my user’s role: I’ve always been the admin and I’m still (at least in my SQL database) the admin. My user already has that string. That’s why it’s crazy that, just updating WordPress, all of a sudden a user with “a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}” wasn’t considered the admin anymore. I’d like to ask WordPress 4.7 what’s an admin, in its “opinion”. ??