We have had many requests from users related to administrator menu items missing or the menu being totally absent. The issues are being encountered in all situations from new installations to full seized updates and/or migrations. Many articles on the Joomla and Mambo-forums as well as manuals from other sources such as CuteFTP/WS FTP have guided us to create this document to pinpoint you to possible causes and might-be solutions to the issue.

Here are some of the topics encountered:

Help:: I have no administrator menu. I have just done a new installation and the menu does not show.

Help: My system information menu item is missing from the menu

Help: I click a menu-item and I am being re-directed to the login screen again!

Help: After upgrade my menu does not work anymore. It shows but when I click on it nothing happens.

Help, the admin-template does not show up I only have text-fields!

Most encountered cause: FTP-uploads

No matter how many different FTP clients we have tried, none of them work perfectly. Loads of people encounter regularly FTP-upload problems. Either the uploads are corrupt or they are incomplete causing the problems to occur. FTP is a single command line protocol and will often create problems when uploading multiple nested folders to a server...Regretfully that is fact of life and cannot be changed using FTP. Users and especially inexperienced users upload text files such as php- and js- files in BINARY mode rather than the required ASCII mode. This of course creates havoc with the files. Another option with FTP is that it is allowed to change file-names during transfer. Changing Caps to lowercase during upload is one of the culprits and is error-prone. Try to minimize those settings is one way of doing it.

Repairing General:
Re-uploading the files in ASCII format (with filename case changing disabled) should clear the error. Overwrite!

Another option which we clearly prefer for users who have access to cPanel is:
Upload the entire .zip to cPanel’s backend and them extract them from here. This is almost without errors because you only upload a single file and not multiple nested folders. We advise to upload zip files then uncompress remotely via the cPanel backend. You can upload the file using CuteFTP / WS FTP or whatever “good” client; then go into your website’s cPanel and browse to the file manager. From there you can unzip the file you uploaded. This is almost monkey-proof.

Repairing specific:

The most errors are always found in a corrupt administrator/incude/js – folder and the files within the folder. Before uploading the entire admin folder try to solve the issue by uploading only the mentioned folder.. Most often that already solves any issues related in 80% of the cases….

Take care that you clear your browser cache before retesting…..sometimes cookies are not being cleared properly and cache maintains the old situation. Than you will never be able to see your admin-backend!

If the upload as mentioned above does not do the trick for you try uploading two major folders: /includes with all files and /administrator with all files.
Why these specific files and folders? The contain all the javascript files needed (amongst others) to drive the admin-menu. When the menu-items do not react to clicking on the menu’s you are facing javascript errors. That is easy to check because IE presents you with a yellow warning triangle in the status bar (left-bottom of the screen) - double click the triangle, and click to read the error. In Firefox you can access the javascript console, from the tools menu or via the JS-button in your FF-toolbar assuming your FF-Theme provides the option , it will show details of errors. In this tutorial we will not discuss the possible error messages because that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. It is simple…You have javascript errors start re-uploading the folders as mentioned above!

Other issues have been reported as well such as WSYIWYG-related javascript issues causing errors or faulty .htaccess blocking access to javascript files. Even wrong configuration.php settings can cause the issue. The last two you can check easy……disable the .htacess from your ftp or cpanel backend. Rename it temporary to htaccess.txt again to see if disabling the file solves the issue. The configuration.php file settings could be wrong as well: Check that if the live site variable contains www. then so should the URL you access your site. If the livesite variable doesn't contain www. then neither should the URL you use to access your administrative section.

Two last important settings: Firewall and Browser

When you use a Firewall such as Norton, McAfee and Zone Alarm make sure that your site is added to the trusted sites. They might block sometimes access to your site has been reported. Your browser setting should allow javascript and have it enabled!

But the issue is most often solved by re-upload of the /includes and /administrator folders.