Sudden loss of Admin permission to admin Blocks ("Access Denied").

Have you tried this:

http://drupal.org/node/328183#comment-1126015

>
> Also, you should not use Drupal core "Admin Blocks" for OpenPublish.
> Admin Blocks interface is too weak for anything complicated, OpenPublish
> uses Context for aligning blocks instead. You can read more about Context
> in the documentation:
>
> http://openpublishapp.com/doc/managing-regions-and-blocks-context
>

Oh yes, thank you, I have been able to master Contexts over these months and when Blocks disappeared from the Admin menu, I thought at first, Well I'll just use Views to create Blocks, and Context to place them in pages, but felt that wasn't viable for two reasons: How can I create non-Views Blocks (such as changing or replacing the simple Ad blocks that Openpublish comes with, with just my own simple code in them, rather than a Views display versioned as a block?...

But moreso, it's hard to push on with this lengthy learning-curve site with any confidence that something else will just suddenly become imPermissable to me, like Blocks did, if I don't understand what happened and can't fix it.

Would you go ahead and plan to manipulate blocks by creating Views blocks, and using Context to place them on pages?

Any thoughts about where to look to understand how the Admin account could have no Permissions for such a fundemental thing as Block admin'ing?

Thank you SO much for replying. One feels very "at sea" as a newcomer to Drupal with all the millions of questions posted here that never get answered. I thank you for your time helping a very upset soul out.

Take care,
--Salo

I'm experiencing the same thing. I too have tried enabling, and switching to all themes. the Blocks admin menu item is GONE and if I manually put mysite.com/admin/build/block I get the Access Denied screen. I've tried resetting the menus, everything.

I would just use contexts and whatnot but the problem is that I have blocks in places that I need to change or remove.

Does anyone know how permissions to admin controls are done in the database? What should the data look like? Where are these pages/permissions controlled in the code?

UB: Check in your database look at the following:

SELECT * FROM yourdb.menu_router m order by path
See how many rows you have containing admin/build/block, I have 16 in my local db (where I have a Blocks link) and 1 in my production db. For the one similiar link, the data in the row is significantly different, too

SELECT * FROM yourdb.menu_links m where link_path like '%admin/build/block%'
Similar, I have several records in the working app's db, and only one in the production broken db

Let me know if yours is the same.

Irakli, just wanted to thank you for sticking in there with us.

I'm afraid I've been customizing this OP site for too long, and was focusing on Contexts instead of Blocks so I hadn't had occasion to go change existing Blocks until recently -- I don't know exactly when this happened.

I hadn't just reset all my Contexts like Jerzaki, but I have been heavily changing the Contexts that came with OP.

And I've been working hard on building an OP sub-theme that looks completely differently, but this is occurring in Admin themes like Garland, and others I've tried.

I've only installed a few more modules than the default OP ones, which I mentioned above, but everything has been working fine, there's been no indication of another problem.

Isn't there a place where ultimately the software is checking, to determine that I should have no permissions to admin Blocks, that I could check, or change, in the database? I have a technical background, but I'm afraid that Access Control permissions, and how modules might be altering them, is over my head at this point of working to master Drupal.

But it seems like there should be a place were I could manually change a bit of data to force a basic Permission like that to be allowed to the Admin?

Thank you for ANYTHING that pops into your head to try.

On the other hand, is there another way I could create, say, a Block that just contains a PHP code snippet, for example so I could create my own simple Block and include it in a Context to display it? That's what I have to be able to do, what makes me feel I can't live with just using Context instead of core Block management.

Thanks again,
--Salo

But no, of course it couldn't be that simple. Updating the "link_title" field from blank to "Blocks", then rebuilding permissions and rebuilding the admin menu, still "Access Denied" trying to get to "admin/build/block".

But I think you're on to something!

UB! I got mine back. See if this works for you:
DEVEL > Other Tools > Reinstall Modules

** WARNING ** I have NO IDEA what the repercussions of this are as far as customizations, but I haven't seen any blocks disappear or anything, but please BACK UP YOUR DB BEFORE YOU DO THIS

Select the following modules
- admin
- blocks
- ALL OF THE context modules
(I also did menus and ckeditor, but that wasn't because of this)

the Blocks item came back, and all of the "missing" db entries are back....

Enjoy!