Admin: "You are not allowed to edit this post."

  • Resolved Pickleburp

    (@pickleburp)


    12 years, 5 months ago

    I’ve been through the boards and looked at various other posts on this topic and I’m still at a loss. The cause/effect of the symptoms on my issue seem to different from other posts.

    Today a client sent me a message saying that all of his employees with Admin level accounts were getting error messages when creating new posts. This came suddenly and he claims no one changed anything, no new plugins, etc. The last new post was created yesterday.

    I’ve gone through and checked everything I can think of, even going so far as to call the hosting company and having them do a scan of the DB to make sure they were no where near their DB quota, no permissions had changed, etc. He said there were a few minor issues with the DB tables that WP had probably caused, ran a few lines of SQL, and said it was all fixed. We tested, nothing changed.

    Here is what I have tried so far:
    -Manually disabled a number of plugins via Dashboard.
    -Disabled *all* plugins via phpMyAdmin.
    -Disabled user permissions, also via phpMyAdmin, and then re-enabled.
    -Checked numerous known issues involving DB tables and older WP installations. Everything is up to date and looking good.
    -Forced the DB to an old version, went to Dashboard, WP upgraded again. Verified in phpMyAdmin.

    No imports have been made lately, so it’s not a Tumblr import messing things up or the like. We did some WordPress blog imports from their original WP installation about a month ago to a different server, but that data has never caused an issue on the dev server or the live server.

    No PHP error logs are generated, and it hasn’t generated an error in over a week.

    The only thing I haven’t tried is switching the site’s theme to Twenty Ten, because that would cause absolute havoc on the live site. We may have to export the site as it is right now back to the dev server to confirm that it’s not a server issue and see if we can switch the theme there. In the meantime, I’m just curious if anyone has any other ideas?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    12 years, 5 months ago

    The only thing I haven’t tried is switching the site’s theme to Twenty Ten, because that would cause absolute havoc on the live site.

    Just switch it for fey moments.

    Thread Starter Pickleburp

    (@pickleburp)

    12 years, 5 months ago

    Thanks t-p, we’ll have to try it late at night when traffic dies down.

    Thread Starter Pickleburp

    (@pickleburp)

    12 years, 5 months ago

    I guess my question is, why would the front-end theme even matter anyway? The problem isn’t in getting posts to display on the site; they display just fine. If it’s a PHP-related issue (again, no errors in the log but I need to enable E_NOTICE in the admin section) then since the PHP files are in /wp-admin/ and /wp-includes/, how could files in /wp-content/themes/ even affect a user’s ability to create a new post?

    Maybe I’m overlooking something but I don’t see how they’re related.

    Thread Starter Pickleburp

    (@pickleburp)

    12 years, 5 months ago

    Update #2:

    So we figure the only reason the theme swap should matter are the template functions included. Since this is a business-to-business site and traffic is low on the weekends, I swapped the theme to Twenty-Eleven this morning. No luck. Even with that theme active, we still go the same error message.

    The hosting company assures me that there are no corruption issues with the DB and they claim that everything looks normal. They said there were a few minor errors in the DB a few days ago, but they figured they existed before the issue arose and they went through and cleaned them up.

    Very, very frustrating and confusing.

    Last night the hosting company had their graveyard tech wipe the site entirely and restore it from a backup version from what we think was before the problem started showing up. Obviously this didn’t fix it or I would have just been updating on that. :\

    Anyone? Bueller?

    Thread Starter Pickleburp

    (@pickleburp)

    12 years, 5 months ago

    RESOLVED

    Finally got this resolved. It turned out to be a problem with the WordPress database.

    This morning as I was debugging, I checked the value of the hidden input field for post_ID in a developer copy of the site (on another server) that is running correctly and the version of the live site, and noticed that the field populated with the next incremental value from the DB table wp_posts, while the “broken” version returned zero.

    I did some digging around and narrowed down where the incorrect value could be passed in. Firebug was showing that the site was hitting the database and getting a normal response (no “invalid username”, etc.), but it was returning “0” for the post_ID rather than what it should have been, 5746.

    I went into /wp-admin/includes/post.php down to the function get_default_post_to_edit on line 403, then commented out line 423 where it grabs the post_ID from the DB and sets it. Instead, I put in $post_id = "5746" and forced it to recognize the next incremental value.

    At first, it didn’t seem to do much good, but after refreshing the page a few times and trying to force it to accept, the database stored the value and allowed me to save the post with that ID.

    After that I removed all of my comments and echoes and tried making a few new posts from scratch, using Firebug to track the incremental post_ID value in the hidden form input, and everything works perfectly. It allows us to save to draft, publish, and all other new post functions as normal.

    As to what caused this exactly, I don’t know. I’m guessing it was some type of data “hiccup” in the database system. At least now if we ever run into this again, we know how to fix it.

    Hopefully this can help someone else in the future as well.

    PhotoMan

    (@photoman)

    12 years ago

    Does anyone now if this has been fixed in 3.3.1??

    xongooli

    (@xongooli)

    11 years, 10 months ago

    SOLVED – AN EASIER SOLUTION (for me at least)

    Pickleburp’s post above got me thinking so I checked the “create New Post” form’s source code and sure enough a value of zero was allocated to the hidden field “post_ID”.

    I then checked the posts database table in PHPMYADMIN and found that the ‘auto_increment’ setting on the post_ID field had somehow been turned off. Switching this ON fixed the issue.

    As a side note, I had imported all the posts from blogger and this may have caused the issue since many other members had run imports prior to encountering this issue.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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