ACL Escape Hatch
It's 5:32 PM Friday evening and time to go celebrate as you launched the biggest website of your career earlier in the week. You took great care to use the latest technology provided by Joomla! 1.6; nested categories for greater content control and carefully tuned permissions powered by the new ACL. You've even trained your client in all of the "ins and outs" of access control levels so that they can manage and create user groups on their own.
On the way out of the office, the phone things. You pick up the phone in one hand, notebook computer in the other, your client is freaking out "I can't log into my site. No one can!". You calmly ask your client what he was doing when this happened. "Oh, I was just adjusting the global admin permissions." Ah ha! So you boot up your notebook, FTP to the client website, download a current copy of configuration.php and add the following line of code:
You upload the new configuration.php, ask your to client log in as the Super User and ask then to set Admin to allow for the Super Users group.
Client crisis over.
This is the ACL fail-safe implemented in Joomla! 1.6, designed to restore admin access, which is necessary to access the Global Configuration and Global Permissions. To temporarily assign admin rights to a single user, add the above line of code, using either the user ID or username, to configuration.php. Once logged in, that user can restore proper access rights. Be sure to remove this line of code, after proper access is restored, or click the link in the message to do it automatically.
