Changing User Roles

Do you have access to phpmyadmin? (so you can edit the database directly)

I just tried duplicating this scenario, and wordpress won’t let the admin user do it to themselves. You can edit another user. This leaves me to think you must have changed your admin to an author from another user that has the power to change the level. Can you log in with that user and fix it?

I don’t know about “phpmyadmin.” I think I do not…now. I had just set up my blog to get ready for the fall and was prowling around to remind myself of options as I am bland new to blogging. I had no other users, but I was looking at the “role” options. I was set as the “administrator,” when I changed the setting to “author.” That changed everything. Now I can only see the tabs:
Dashboard, Write, Manage, and Profile. All the others are gone? After your post, I tried to type in: wp-admin/users.php after the .org part of the URL, but when I enter, everything drops off after the slash… Any other suggestions?

Well, you’ll probably need the help of your web host. You or they can use phpmyadmin to manually edit the wordpress database tables. This must be done very carefully.

There is a table called wp_usemeta. In it, there is a setting for your admin user’s priviledges. You’ll find a field that contains something like “a:1:{s:6:"author";b:1;}“, and you want to change it to be “a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;}“. (not including the quotes).

Back up the mysql database first beforehand in case it’s further broken. Considering your level of comfort, I would ask your web host if they can make this change for you.