Of WordPress Upgrades and Plugin Compatibility – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page

by Abhinav Kaiser on August 14, 2009

Although WordPress is unquestionably the best CMS in the world due to it’s huge base of coders, it’s probably a bane on users such as me. We have a new WordPress (minor) release almost every week which is great for the world. But, for a self publisher, the time and effort required to upgrade WP is enormous although the process itself is simple. One might argue that I don’t have to upgrade at all, but I have faced the wrath of missing a few upgrades in between and multiplying my workload.

Well, the purpose of this post is not to whine and grind about the frequency of updates but to proclaim the Eureka that I stumbled upon.

After upgrading to version 2.8, I recently noticed that a number of my plugins’ settings pages started throwing up an error message that said – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. I did what most of us would do by pasting the error appended by the name of the plugin in Google.

Several search pages opened up with numerous solutions. One such post mentioned about the possibility of such errors when a database is imported; not my case. Another one talked about the database prefixes that are set to anything other than wp_; not my case yet again.

To make the long story short, I found a longish fix which worked for me. I followed the same route by googling and finding fixes for my other plugins.

In the exhausted state of mine, I did manage to light a spark and found a common denominator between all the fixes. Although all the recommended fixes were lengthy, there was just one keyword that connected each one of them.

I did some little testing and found out that the fix was far more simple than what was presented.

Here it goes

1. Most plugins these days don’t come as one file anymore, that makes things a little complicated. Identify all the .php files in your plugin.
2. Open each one of them (I would start with the obvious one like the name_of_the_plugin.php) and search for admin_head.
3. After you locate it, replace it with admin_menu.
4. Voila!!!!!! The error vanishes and your plugin’s settings page is back to work.

Honest to God, I don’t know what it means or what it does, but it works. I have never bragged about me being a hacker nor do I have any high level programming skills. But, I am glad I figured this out and a few more earlier.

I am interested to know what it actually does, if anybody has even a slightest clue, bring me out of my misery.

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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

Steve August 29, 2009 at 3:42 pm

Your “admin_head” fix worked for me. Looks like the old plugin was probably using an incorrect function call or have Wordpress deprecated some older functions?

Abhinav Kaiser August 29, 2009 at 10:28 pm

That’s true Steve. Starting from Wordpress 2.8, some calling functions have changed and this is the only one I know that impacts plugins…

Josh September 7, 2009 at 5:59 pm

You are amazing!!!!
I searched high and low and none of the other ideas this worked instantly!!!
Thanks!!!

Watson October 17, 2009 at 4:15 pm

You are a life saver! This worked perfectly. I am so glad I found this post. I have been looking for over half an hour now for an answer. Seemingly such a simple answer and yet not one I ever would have discovered on my own. Thank you!

Sam November 4, 2009 at 6:27 pm

You legend! This error has been annoying me for weeks and your fix has worked. cheers for posting this.

DMW November 4, 2009 at 10:55 pm

You. Effing. Rock.

Thanks for posting this. Fixed my problem instantly.

HP May 13, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Just installed it and it works fantastic. Thanks for this and keep up the good work ;)

soulconstruct November 16, 2010 at 10:52 pm

Hey brother thank you for the post… It made my life much simpler.. thank you for you hard work..

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