Permission Error accessing /wp-admin

Don’t EVER post your username and password on a public forum. You need to change those immediately.

The security plugin may be locking you out now. Also, that particular plugin will give you the opportunity to create a different login page as an extra security step.

Try the Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin for your images:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

Hope that helps,
Don

I did not post any sensitive UN/PW information and would never. I appreciate your concern and the concern of the mod but at a 14 year plus professional web designer, I know better but you couldn’t have known that.

Although if you had gone to the site you have seen that the UN/PW were simply to deal with controlling access to viewing the site. It gets a lot of traffic and we didn’t want the masses to view it until we fixed it. It was simply a password protected folder.

I included the UN/PW so that anyone who might be able to help me could view the issue.

That UN/PW in no way could provide anyone any more access to the site than to simply view it as a visitor.

I appreciate the rec for the plugin but as mentioned above I cannot login to the dashboard to install it if I wanted to.

Your advice is sound and appreciated. Sorry to be defensive but…Mercury is only now leaving retrograde. Ha!

Sammy, Have you tried a safe search and replace?
You mentioned that the images are pointing to

https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wordpress/wp-content/uploads

when they should be pointing to

https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads

https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

There is a safe search and replace script that I always use when transferring sites and it would be perfect for this case, as well, since you need a solution without logging into the site.

BACKUP your database before continuing.

Basically you run the script (doesn’t have to be placed on the server as long as you can run it in the browser window).
It will ask for your database host url, login, pass, etc. (unless you put it on the server, DO NOT click “pre-populate credentials”)
Then it will ask you to select the tables in the database that you want to affect, blah blah, and then it will ask you what you want to search for and replace.

In this specific case I would search for:

rocktownhall.com/blogs/wordpress

And replace with:

rocktownhall.com/blogs

MAKE SURE to leave off the end slash, otherwise it will leave a few things out in the search and replace.

Hi Sammy,

Glad to hear it. No, there was no way for me to know and was just looking out for a community member.

Regarding the recommendation for the security plugin: That was not a recommendation (although I would highly recommend it), it was a gentle reminder of one way that plugin secures the site. The way that particular feature works is that it makes the login page something other than wp-admin so you would not be able to login at that page. I thought it was a possibility that should be mentioned. It will also lock you out after a certain number of attempts. Again, I don’t know that is what is happening but it is worth mentioning.

donhoward: I truly do appreciate any and all help/advice that I have received here and elsewhere. The web-community at large is like an evolution of the hippy movement, though probably better groomed.

I have used the AIO Security (the one that sparked the issue) on other sites to change the login page but that wasn’t the issue here. BTW: It has worked wonderfully on other sites, so there was just something hinky on this site.

The problem was that I had the plugin in change all of the database table prefixes from “wp_” to some random 6 character prefix. That, for some unknown reason, unleashed havoc.

Endlyss Member: Thank you for that script suggestion. I have finally fixed my situation so I don’t need it now, though it would’ve come in handy! I do though move site frequently and have been doing more and more WP based sites for clients so this will likely come in handy down the line.

For anyone wondering what I did: Via phpadmin (cPanel) I searched thru the database tables and changed the prefix back to “wp_”. There is a search-and-replace function in here that works on, at least, a table by table basis. I deleted the plugin via ftp. I deleted all table columns (?) that were related to the plugin (had aios… in it). I downloaded the version of WP the site was using (which was the most current) and replaced all the folders/files via ftp except the content folder. I then, to be overly safe, created a new user for the database and added in the missing info in the wp-config.php file.

That restored the site back to the way it was with the exception of still not allowing me to access the WP dashboard. I could login via a homepage plugin but got a permission error when trying to access /wp-admin.

At this point, I threw in the towel, hired a pro via freelancer.com and for $25, he fixed the rest in about 40 minutes.