Administrator Menu Not Appearing in Joomla’s Backend

We had a very curious case today: an occasional customer of ours emailed us and told us that for the past few months they weren’t able to see the administrator menu in the backend. They temporarily addressed the problem by installing an extension called Admin Menu Manager, which provided an alternative for generating the admin menu.

Of course, that wasn’t an ideal solution, and that’s why they came to us. The first thing that we did was uninstalling the Admin Menu Manager extension, and when we did that, the backend was menuless (yes, we just invented a word!).

At first, we thought that there was an error somewhere in the menu (non-fatal error) that was causing this issue, so we set Error Reporting to Maximum in the global configuration settings, but the website was clean as snow, it was errorless (that’s two words already!), which really meant one of the following 5 things:

1. There is corruption at the ACL (Access Control List) level.

2. The Administrator Menu module is disabled.

3. The Administrator Menu module is trashed/deleted.

4. The Administrator Menu extension is disabled.

5. The Administrator Menu extension is uninstalled.

So, the first thing that we checked was the ACL corruption, and, after a quick glimpse at the ACL tables in the database, we were able to confirm that the issue was not there.

The next thing to do was checking the Extensions -> Modules page (which we accessed using the following URL: [www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com]administrator/index.php?option=com_modules ) to see if there was a module called Admin Menu of type Administrator Menu with a Special access and assigned to the menu position (of course, we needed to switch the Filter on the left from Site to Administrator first) – there wasn’t! Checking the trashed modules revealed nothing, which primarily meant that the module was trashed and then deleted. Weird…

So, we tried recreating the module by just clicking on the New button (on the top left) when in the Modules page, but, to our surprise, there was no option to create an Administrator Menu module, the list of possible modules started with Administrator Sub-Menu. Huh… This probably meant that the Administrator Menu extension was either disabled or uninstalled.

So, we went to the Extensions -> Manage page (which we accessed from [www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com]/administrator/index.php?option=com_installer), and then we clicked the Manage tab on the left, and then we searched for the extension named Administrator Menu (we expected it to be disabled), but it wasn’t even there! This core extension was uninstalled by someone (or something). This meant that we had to re-install it, and so, we created an installable version of this core extension manually the following way:

• We downloaded a fresh Joomla install.

• We extracted that install and then we navigated to the administrator/modules/mod_menu folder.

• We then copied the en-GB.mod_menu.ini and the en-GB.mod_menu.sys.ini files from the administrator/language/en-GB folder to the above directory (administrator/modules/mod_menu).

• We then compressed (zipped) the contents of the mod_menu directory (we made sure that we compressed the contents of the directory, and not the directory itself). Note: the resulting compressed mod_menu can be found here (note that this is extracted from a Joomla 3.4.5 install, but it can be used on any Joomla 3 website).

• We installed the menu extension created in the previous step by going here [www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com]/administrator/index.php?option=com_installer&view=install and then uploading the zipped file, and voilà, the backend menu appeared in all of its glory! The problem was fixed, hooray!

If the Administrator Menu is not appearing in the backend of your Joomla website, then try following the above guide to locate and fix the issue. If it doesn’t work for you, or if you feel that it’s a bit over your head, then please contact us. We will fix the problem for you at a very affordable price and in the cleanest way possible!