Bug: "web" context can be made unavailable to Administrator

I caused a situation yesterday which in my mind should not happen. As "admin" in Manager I could no longer see Resources and there no longer was a "web" context in the drop-down menu selections to allow me to get them back. I ended up changing data directly in the modx_access_context db table to get out of the predicament. The problem was there were two "web" entries in the "target" field of that table, but neither was assigned to a valid "principal" (user group).

This may have happened when I put all resources in a resource group that I as administrator did not have access to. Possibly since I was no longer assigned to "web" context that context option was taken away from me.

Another possibility is that I may have unintentionally been making changes from two separate sessions of Manager. After I got into my predicament I started removing resource groups, users groups, and users to try to get back to square-one. I may have been doing all this in the two separate sessions. Both are on the same computer and sometimes I lose track of whether I’m in Mac OS X or Windows XP.

Bottom line is no matter how I caused the problem, it should not have happened. In my mind the Administrator should never lose access to "web" context. Even if he were to remove the access for himself, he should at least have a way to get it back or assign to someone else. But when he doesn’t have access to resources in that context the context selection is not even available to him.

The problem is that the admin Super User is just another user and, as such, can lose rights to anything. I’ve argued (unsuccessfully) that the admin Super User should have all rights, always, in both Evo and Revo, but it would definitely slow things down if every single action had to check to see if the request came from the admin Super User.

The good news is that once you understand Revolution permissions, you’re unlikely to cut off your own access to things.

Another suggestion: before you jump off into working in the more advanced areas of Revo I would suggest a backup of the database, so you can quickly and easily get back to work. I would also, work on these concepts on a test site until you have them down.