My Dashboard is Essentially Empty

Make sure you log in as an admin, as not all rolls will see all of the backend.

Thanks Bill, I understand, but I am logged in as admin.

Your post, however, makes me wonder if something clobbered the admin role permissions, or the role of the admin account itself. I’m going to have to go in through phpAdmin to examine that possibility, since there’s no way for me to view the roles through the dashboard.

-E

Sounds like a good idea.

Nope, that’s not it. The wp_capabilities meta_key is correct as: a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}

So the dashboard is still empty, and I’m still stumped about what’s going on.

-E

Replace wp-admin folder there must be a corrupted file in that folder.
If problem still persist then add this to wp-config.php file-

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);
define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
?>
Now check what error you get.

CMSHelpLive, thank you for the suggestions.

It doesn’t appear to be a corrupt file in wp-admin. I pulled the 3.9.3 WP archive from the respository, changed the existing wp-admin directory name to wp-admin.bak, and added wp-admin from the respository version. Same problem.

Adding error reporting, however, generated two lines of warnings:

Notice: has_cap was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 2.0! Usage of user levels by plugins and themes is deprecated. Use roles and capabilities instead. in /home/content/36/11008436/html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3193

Notice: has_cap was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 2.0! Usage of user levels by plugins and themes is deprecated. Use roles and capabilities instead. in /home/content/36/11008436/html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3193

I turned off all the plugins, one by one, by renaming their directories and found that a plugin named “addsticky-popups-made-easy” was responsible for the reported warnings… However, the problem persists. Still nothing on the dashboard.

Interestingly, Jetpack is the only plugin that shows up, and so I thought it might be causing problems. When I rename that plugin directory, the Jetpack is removed from the sidebar, but again, the sidebar is still empty.

Any other thoughts, anybody?

-E

Have you tried deactivating all plugins and with them off, switching to a default theme to see if it’s specific to your theme?

I haven’t tried switching to another theme; if I do that, I’ll have to do it through the backdoor, because the themes don’t show up on the dashboard either.

Thanks,
E

Did you have any luck with this, I appear to be running in to exactly the same issue with a older client website.

Yes, I did finally solve it.

First, I updated to WP 4.1. I had to request the webhost’s support team to do this for me since I didn’t have the ability through my empty dashboard.

Next, I checked the database. It was a capabilities issue. I don’t know if I checked the wp_capabilities for the wrong nickname before, or if something was fixed through the update. But the bottom line is I edited the wp_capabilities column in the wp_usermeta table for my admin user, and set it to a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;}.

Once that was done, the dashboard came back.

Hope this fixes your problem.

-E

(Oh yeah, and this is resolved.)