sorry, but its as it says…  the user in question is not an sp admin…  wp admins are not by default sp admins…  so if you want wp admins to have sp admin capabilities, you must give theme to them on forum – admins – manage admins… of course, you do this as an sp admin…

at this point, there must be one sp admin account in wp… otherwise, its opened up to all wp admins…

Mr Papa said

at this point, there must be one sp admin account in wp… otherwise, its opened up to all wp admins…

That’s just it. There are three, and only three, admins. Despite authenticating serially as each of these three users, I still get the warning.

I imagine that there is some value in some database table for this plugin that sets this. I’ll have to poke around and try to find it, I guess. Any further ideas would be gratefully received.

Since we haven’t launched the site (so that there are no postings to preserve), it turned out to be more expedient to delete the plugin’s database tables and files, and to do a fresh install. It will require some time to set it all up again (not thrilled about that), but it is at least a path forward.

It’s strange that none of the three admin users was able to access the admin–all generating the above-referenced warning. I gather that this is not the expected behavior.

I understand.

When SP is first installed, the user who carried out the install procedure is made a Simple:Press Admin. As Steve stated above – a Simple:Press Admin is NOT the same as a user with a WordPress Administrator role.

So at first install, the one and only Simple:Press Admin is the only user with access to the forum admin panels. It is this user that needs to create further Simple:Press Admins should they be required.

If, when loading, it is found that there are NO Simple:Press Admins defined then admin status should be temporarily granted to a WP Administrator so that they in turn can create a new Simple:Press Admin user. They should get offered the forum > Admins section to do so.

It is, sadly, possible to delete the one and only Simple:Press Admin user if that user account is deleted in the WordPress ‘users’ admin panel. It is one of the few WP tasks that does NOT allow plugins to modify the behaviour of which is, of course, extremely annoying.

So – if you can read through the above are you able to say what may have gone wrong?

Yellow Swordfish said

…. So – if you can read through the above are you able to say what may have gone wrong?

Yes indeed. Thinking back, I deleted the original admin account that I used to install Simple:Press.

This was a bit of an inconvenience but easily worked around because I didn’t need to preserve postings from users–simply creating a fresh install solved it.

For what it’s worth, I am now paranoid of even inadvertently doing this again once the site goes into production, so I created a couple of other admin accounts and assigned them Simple:Press admin roles. So if I delete one later, it won’t effectively lock me out as Simple:Press admin.

Out of curiosity (and perhaps to help someone else who finds this discussion later), what would someone do who finds himself in that situation but doesn’t want to create a fresh install (and lose the posting and configuration data)? I poked around the database tables and wasn’t able to find some simple value to change (though I only spent about 5 minutes looking).

If you had managed to wait another hour for me to reply then I could have given you the necessary database column data necessary. You will find this in the WP Usermeta table under table_prefix+’capabilities’. It also needs a simple update to the SP SFMembers table where the ‘admin’ column for the user needs to be set to a true value (1).

What concerns me here is that as a WP Admin user then you should have been offered the capability to create a new SP Admin if no SP Admins existed. You seem to be suggesting this was not possible and if this is really the case we need to investigate that.

I’m not used to such responsive help (thank you for that), and yes, I wish I had waited for the answer but actually it’s good for me to configure this from the ground up once again, because, two days from launch, I have some better ideas for setting up the forums than I did a couple of months ago when I started building the site, and I need to refresh myself on all the amazing possibilities for setting up SP, especially the add-ons.

To confirm, I was not offered the opportunity to create a new SP Admin, so far as I know. Certainly, I would have noticed that, I would think.

not sure what Andy meant by offered chance to create new admin…  if all sp admins are removed, then the forum admin is opened up to all wp admins with a warning displayed across top of admin pages… just ran quick test and that seemed to be working…  will dig a bit deeper…

but none the less, glad you are back on track… please holler if you have any other issues..