Uninstalling s2Member causes permission issue

Hi Guys,

I just deactivated & uninstalled the s2Member Framework, after having turned off the “Deactivation Safeguards.”

It seemed to uninstall okay, but then I’m getting this error on certain pages in the admin area:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

It happens when trying to view /wp-admin and also when I try to edit my own profile (I can edit other users’ profiles, oddly)…and on several other pages that I can’t remember offhand.

I reinstalled and reactivated s2Member and the problem went away.

How can I cleanly uninstall s2Member and avoid this issue?

Thanks,
Andrew

Hi Andrew. That’s odd, first time I hear about this problem happening. What is your setting for [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields[/hilite]? That’s probably the only access s2Member affects in the admin area.

Hi Cristián,

I don’t have any custom registration/profile fields. The other options in that section are:

Collect First/Last Names during Registration? –> Yes

Set “Display Name” during Registration? –> Yes (set Display Name to User’s Full Name)

Allow Custom Passwords during Registration? –> No (send auto-generated passwords via email; after registration)

Force Personal Emails during Registration –> (blank)

Integrate Custom Registration/Profile Fields with BuddyPress? –> (all unchecked)

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We had BuddyPress installed for a little while, and I’ve deactivated it. We have BBpress installed. I believe both were installed after originally installing s2Member, but I don’t remember for sure.

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Other notes — I thought maybe the permissions were corrupted for my own profile somehow, so I was able to create a new profile (with Administrator access). I then logged in with the new profile and had the exact same issues — I could edit other profiles, but not view the new one to edit it.

Any other ideas? This is a pretty big hurdle for us at the moment! Let me know if I can do anything else to help troubelshoot…

Thanks,
Andrew

I’ve been troubleshooting for a few hours, and my best guess right now is a conflict between bbPress and s2Member.

I had bbPress installed, and had used the “Update Roles/Capabilities” button in the “Other s2Member Integrations -> bbPress Plugin Integration” section.

So something is messed up with user capabilities right now (which explains why only some areas of the site are returning errors, and others are not).

How can I get our user capabilities back to where they were before installing s2member?

Thanks,
Andrew

I think I’ve got it sorted.

The user roles & capabilities were quite corrupted, which seems to be the result of s2member and BBpress (and possibly BuddyPress, which I had installed earlier, but had since deactivated) not playing nicely with each other. Administrator roles had somehow lost many, but not all, of their capabilities.

After hours of troubleshooting (!), I found the “Advanced Access Manager” and managed to give Administrators access to everything again. Phew!

Thanks for the update, Andrew.

The button in s2Member’s integration panel for bbPress, was added recently to deal with a big change bbPress introduced in the way they use roles and capabilities. http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/dont-upgrade-to-bbpress-2-2/#post-32523

We are not aware of it causing the problem you reported so, if you could describe the sequence of things you did that led to that problem, we’d be happy to try reproducing it in order to determine if there’s a bug we need to fix.

I’m notifying Jason of this thread, so he can take a look at what you’re reporting.

Hi Christian,

Unfortunately, I don’t know the exact steps I took to reproduce the problem. I can tell you that we had BuddyPress, bbPress and s2Member installed — and I think I installed them all in that order. I then deactivated BuddyPress because we decided we didn’t need all the features of BuddyPress.

I then spent awhile working with s2member, trying to figure out if the software was the right choice for us… So quite a bit of time, maybe a week, passed before the next steps… I then deactivated s2Member and came across the permission issues.

Reactivating s2M immediately solved the problem. I tried deactivating — and deleting — both bbPress and s2M, and then doing fresh installs, and then uninstalling s2M again, but the problem just kept returning. Ultimately, what seemed to have happened was that many (but not all, oddly) of the “Administrator” level account capabilities had been disabled.

I may have activated/deactivated some of those plugins in between each of these steps, I’m sorry I don’t remember more clearly.

Hope that helps!

Best,
Andrew

Thanks for the info, Andy. Do you remember what versions of WP and the plugins you used?

I think we were still on WP 3.4.2, but I don’t remember for sure. We may have already updated to 3.5. I think bbPress wzas 2.2.3.. and I don’t remember the version of BuddyPress – it would have been a recent one, in the last three weeks or so.

Hope that helps?

Thank you very much. :)

Thanks for the heads up on this thread.

Regarding a complete and total reset of your WordPress Capabilities, please see this post.
http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/dont-upgrade-to-bbpress-2-2/#post-34350

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

It happens when trying to view /wp-admin and also when I try to edit my own profile (I can edit other users’ profiles, oddly)…and on several other pages that I can’t remember offhand.

Reactivating s2M immediately solved the problem. I tried deactivating — and deleting — both bbPress and s2M, and then doing fresh installs, and then uninstalling s2M again, but the problem just kept returning. Ultimately, what seemed to have happened was that many (but not all, oddly) of the “Administrator” level account capabilities had been disabled.

The release of s2Member v121201 took care of compatibility issues with the latest release of bbPress: http://www.s2member.com/changelog/#s2-changes-v121201

Regarding the bug report here in this thread…

I’ve been unable to reproduce this so far. The only Capabilities that s2Member removes if you deactivate it with Deactivation Safeguards turned OFF, are the Capabilities that control s2Member functionality (i.e. access_s2member_level1, 2, 3, 4, etc). No changes occur to default Administrative capabilities whatsoever.

Therefore, I suspect the underlying issue on your installation might have been related to compatibility issues between different versions of s2Member and bbPress. To avoid this issue going forward, please make sure you’re running bbPress 2.2.2+ and s2Member v121201+, where the incompatibility issues have been corrected.

UPDATE: I was able to reproduce this upon installating bbPress v2.0.3, upgrading to bbPress v2.2.2, then upgrading to bbPress v2.2.3. The issue seems to be related to the loss of the “read” capability while upgrading bbPress. If s2Member is also running, it will automatically fix the issue because it adds the read capability at runtime. However, if s2Member is deactivated, this corruption will appear in the form of errors stating “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” on certain pages that check for the “read” capability.

The solution is to do a full reset of your WordPress Capabilities, as described here:
http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/dont-upgrade-to-bbpress-2-2/#post-34350
(Or, if you know how to update your Roles/Capabilities manually, simply restore the “read” Capability to Administrators,Editors,Authors, Contributors,Subscribers)

Disclaimer: I was unable to find any hard evidence in code that this was indeed bbPress causing the corruption. However, since I was unable to reproduce it with s2Member alone, and I was unable to reproduce it with s2Member being activated/deactivated with bbPress installed together with s2Member; it leads me to believe it is caused by corruption of the “read” capability, introduced by another plugin. I can’t be sure which other plugin (or plugin version). The latest versions of bbPress do not seem to cause this, so I would think this might only happen to sites that were running past versions of bbPress and then upgraded to a newer version of bbPress.

For the benefit of other readers….

If you’re having problems with Roles/Capabilities where s2Member is or has been running with bbPress or BuddyPresss, or both; please follow the procedure described here to do a complete reset of your Roles/Capabilities.

It could be that your Roles/Capabilities were modified by one of all of these plugins (s2Member,bbPress,BuddyPresss), and if compatibility issues existed between different versions at some point when you upgraded, you could be left with some mild corruption. Normally, upgrading to the latest release of s2Member would resolve issues like this. However, if you’re still having trouble, please do a complete reset of your Roles/Capabilities. Remember to do a full backup of your site first. Also remember to “reactivate” each plugin after you reset your Roles/Capabilities so that each plugin is again making the changes it needs to work properly. It is a good idea to activate bbPress first, then BuddyPress, then s2Member (in that order). Not required in that order, but that order can help to further improve your chances of smooth sailing.