Joomla's user groups can be really powerful.
However, it's also possible to cause problems for yourself by making errors while setting up the user groups.
One Joomlashack member remained a super administrator and able to log-in to their site, but they lost the ability to see the administrator menu links and edit their site.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to rescue yourself if your super administrator account no longer has the permissions it should.
Here's what Joomla's User Groups Should Look Like
If you have made a mess of your user groups, it's worth trying to reset your group. Here are what the default Joomla user groups look like:
Reset the User Groups
The quickest way to reset your user groups is via the database.
In this tutorial, I'm going to access the database via a tool called phpMyAdmin.
I'm looking for a table called "#_viewlevels". This table controls the relationship between the different user groups.
Here's what we want the rows in this table to look like. The most important thing that you need to fix is the rules column. Each number in the rules column refers to a user group.
If you're interested, these numbers can be seen in your site's admin area by going to Users > Groups:
Your task is to click the "Edit" button next to these database rows and to make them match the original Joomla defaults. If you have extra numbers in the rules column, leave them where they are.
