Can't find any templates - cannot edit header or footer

Hello,

So EE2 is pretty old. If you are able to upgrade, that would be a great thing, however I understand that might not be an immediate possibility. With an upgrade of that many versions you will want to pay close attention to any Add-ons in use & whether or not they have Current, Compatible versions for EE7. I know there are others here that can help better in that regard.

As far as the way the site is built. You might look to see if they used Embeds for the header & footer areas instead of Layouts… that is an alternate, common way of building. I’m not positive where to tell you to look. I have only had 2 EE2 sites and it’s been years.

BTW… EE version 2 docs are here: https://docs.expressionengine.com/v2/

Thank you, Russ.

I can’t find any templates in the CMS interface, and no mention of embeds. I checked global variables (there seems to be none) as well as widgets, snippets and pages, all of which have reasily recognisable names (referencing people or organisations) and nothing related to headers and footers. So I decided to try something different.

The file manager that comes with the server’s control panel makes it easy to poke around on the server, and in the various directories where the site content is located I found a directory “templates”, inside it a subdirectory “default_site” and inside that several other directories, one of which is called “embeds.group”. And in there are several html files, including _header and _footer.

OK, so then I used the file editor that also comes with the server’s control panel to edit (update) the content of the header and footer files, and that solved the problem of the outdated links. The next thing to do now is to read the manual to see what I may be overlooking…

Thanks again!

Yuu

Glad you found everything and were able to take care of your immediate need. Like I said… not most familar with that older version but you can always make edits to the files on the system like you did to make edits to templates. It is tough to tell you where to look for specific things without actually looking at the EE Control Panel.

If you need any other help just ask. There is also a lot of great help on the EE Slack Channel.

Russ

… I found a directory “templates”, inside it a subdirectory “default_site” and inside that several other directories, one of which is called “embeds.group”. And in there are several html files, including _header and _footer.

Right. So, given a user with sufficient permissions, you should be able to find a template group named “embeds” in the Control Panel. It’s much easier to edit templates that way, than go the file-based server route …

Hi again… thanks for the additional information about permissions.

It looks like we don’t have sufficient permission to access everything, and we have no idea how to get it. 😊

There is only one log in ID and password that we know of, and that is the one that everybody who needed access has been using until today. I can imagine that there might have been an admin account, as well, that was used at the time the website was made, but nobody knows anything about that.

Is there a special file somewhere that contains the information related to access permissions and that could be edited or perhaps simply deleted and that way force a reset to some default settings?

Thanks!

Yuu

It looks like we don’t have sufficient permission to access everything, and we have no idea how to get it.

Unfortunately it’s really not possible to give good advice from a distance, as it were: the version you’re on, your setup etc. all come into play here.

I can imagine that there might have been an admin account, as well, that was used at the time the website was made, but nobody knows anything about that.

There should be at least one user belonging to the “Superadmin” group of users, yes, who has unlimited access (much like the “root” user on UNIX/Linux systems, if you are familiar with the concept.)

Is there a special file somewhere that contains the information related to access permissions and that could be edited or perhaps simply deleted and that way force a reset to some default settings?

It’s all stored in the database. You can take a look there (perhaps using some software like phpMyAdmin or similar). Check out the exp_members table to see what users your server knows about.

Find [ROOT]/system/expressionengine/config/database.php and open it in an editor to get credentials for the database server so you can view the database in PhpMyAdmin

I happen to have a EE 2.11.9 site running on a local server. In PhpMyAdmin I copied the administrator account.

In another folder I installed a fresh copy of EE 2.11.9 with username “Admin” and password “password”, then in PhpMyAdmin in the new database I copied the values of the following fields in the exp_members table: password, salt, unique_id and crypt_key and pasted them in the matching fields of the old installation.

I could then login to the old installation with these new credentials and had complete access.

If you’re looking for a copy of EE 2.11.9, I have one lying around with an unused license.

Maybe you can even use the credentials I created: username “Admin” with password “password”.

Database values in table exp_members:

password: 1c76150d7eff192267dbdbcb5fce271297f02c730cbbeb1e9e59e190d45a5c250aa101ed51a9a32068c80d7430c21ad3ed6713fafd377d4f5701f2bd3010e0ec

salt: 38QEf?e;9w1[<!’`2QYdv&oNiT;_[gv.!5kb+cSj]M-K@C|e6!F=I\X+D:Up?5&siVR;#>XfOBAlZf7YX’,@H#_~5w8zWvFZ>’XGJ7‘cnP5MxJ@k”DMe2j>lX^`:z`

unique_id: 15e072945c6ae07486406b877cfe8bc132f1a73c

crypt_key: 6419e3567c8d98399c1632ba1754e64e5924dfd2

Mind you that you will be needing an old PHP version. Version 5.6.40 worked well for me. EE2 does not support PHP 7 and higher, I believe.

Hi Zignature, I gave your suggestion a go but it’s still failing to access. I think this is a more deep rooted issue around the auth.php script checking for password lengths and failing, but I could be wrong. Still currently investing the functions output around the auth.php file at the moment.