By tph88 on

I have a new installation of Drupal 7.0.
I added a bit of content , but not too much.
I am trying to change the theme to stark 7 to check out theming.
I clicked 'Admin->Appearance' then under Start 7 clicked 'Enable and set Default'
I get an error that says 'Access denied' 'You are not authorized to access this page.'
I am logged in as the administrator and haven't created any other users.

Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Karen

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

ann_meredith’s picture

ann_meredith commented

Try rebuilding the access permissions at yoursite/admin/reports/status/rebuild

I'm having the same problem, but I also can't get any of my form buttons to work (I'm thinking it has something to do with the theme). This prevents me from rebuilding the permissions. Anybody know a way to rebuild the permissions without going through the site above?

ann_meredith’s picture

ann_meredith commented

I fixed my problem and this might help you. When I installed D7 (an upgrade from D6.20) I modified the .htaccess file in-order to make clean URLs work. To do this I commented out the following line:

RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]

This fixed the clean URL issue but still left my form submit buttons not working. I went back into the .htaccess file and un-commented the line above and also un-commented the following line:

RewriteBase /

After doing this my form submit buttons now worked (I could enable modules, save settings, etc.) AND I now was able to change my theme without getting an access denied page. I hope this helps.

FredderickSmith’s picture

FredderickSmith commented

iPage is the host for my small website. When I first installed Drupal, it was with a script from their web GUI. I've read elsewhere on these forums that this is NOT the recommended path to take, it might have avoided this issue had I known this before-hand...

To try and resolve my issue, I tried every combination of turning Clear URLs on and off, from the settings panel and from within the htaccess file. If I turned them off, I did not get an Access Denied error, but the theme changes wouldn't take, so that was no help.

In order to enable clean URLs to begin with for my site, I had to edit the htaccess file. Drupal was also running out of RAM, and the site would randomly throw 404 error pages as well as timeout on the taxonomy settings pages. The php settings file wasn't set to the proper RAM amount, in that case...

The point here is that their install script did install Drupal fine, but did NOT set the greater web environment properly. So, after a few months of being stuck without the ability to change default themes or enable new themes, I pressed iPage again. I had to re-convince every new tech that I spoke with that this was NOT an internal Drupal issue, and I used the issues listed above as my evidence. Each time, I would get passed to another tech who would give me the same line and I had to convince them as well. The discussion almost came to the point of yelling.

Finally, I pressed on and they went to town, they went to bat, and they figured it out. They even went so far as to re-run their script for installing Drupal into a subdirectory, TWICE, as a matter of fact, so they could examine the process closely. Finally, they told me this:

---
Hello,

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. I have updated your Drupal installation web files and database and turned off register_globals in the account php.ini file. Now, I was able to change theme for the website as well as administration section without any issues. I was able to set the theme 'AT Admin 7.x-1.0' as default for the application. Please check the website functionality once from your end.

If you have any further questions, please update the Support Console.

Sincerely,


Level 3 Technical Support
---

Hopefully, this can help someone, either directly, or indirectly through your web host. This was a very frustrating issue to deal with...in my case, even the good people in the support IRC channel were stumped.

ecosnow’s picture

ecosnow commented

I have tried re-naming/deleting the .htaccess/php.ini files, disabled most of mods, rebuilt permissions, and disabled clean urls.

Can't figure out why I can't change the theme while logged in as the admin.

Any ideas here? Thanks, :)

leenyx’s picture

leenyx commented

I was missing a rule in my NGINX config, and that was the cause I couldn't access to rebuild permissions and changing the theme, as my nginx rules where dismissing any content with parameters in the URL.

Adding the following rule to my nginx config solved the issue for me.

location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
       }
sozonov’s picture

sozonov commented

you saved my day!

tatovic’s picture

tatovic commented

It did the trick for my nginx installation too!

joemoraca’s picture

joemoraca commented

thanks from the future ... or past or just thanks

Abbass’s picture

Abbass commented

I have enabled 'clean url' in admin panel when I worked on my old computer (administration -> configuration -> search and metadata -> clean URLs). But I didn't switch on rewrite_module in my new wamp server in my new computer. That caused me lots of problems: click button unresponsive, unable to install module, unable to login and unable to change theme, because the server was not able to find all the 'clean url' the drupal is keep leading to.

So here is what I did: I clicked the green wamp icon, and then went to 'Apache -> Apache Modules and ticked the rewrite_module. and then refreshed the page. It worked nicely for me!

I spent almost 12 hours debugging this! hope the next person won't spend more than 5 minutes!