I know this question has been posted a few times already, however I feel that the answers do not quite relate to my problem.
I am trying to admin an existing Joomla webpage, however it seems that the previous admin did something that forbids me from accessing the /administrator section on the page. When I try to enter the admin section using sitename.com/administratoror sitename.com/administrator/index.php, I get 403 Forbidden.
I checked the site contents through FTP (which I can access fine) and it seems jSecure plugin is not installed - therefore the admin page should be accessible through /administrator, right? The file permissions for the /administrator folder were 705, I tried changing them to 775, no change. Any suggestions what to do?
To quickly diagnose this, try the following in order; stop when you find one that works, and revert changes one by one until you find the single one that's responsible for the problem. Any modifications to the site's security is to be avoided to prevent weakening your site too much.
(if this is the case, you may have either code that's incompatible with the current Apache version, or instructions to explicitly prevent access)
chmod the /administrator to 777 (and revert immediately if it doesn't work) (in this case, it's a permission problem, just make sure the user running the site has read access to the /administrator folder and subfolders)
re-apply the Joomla Upgrade package to restore original files in place (you have compromised files)
check out the /logs/ and /administrator/logs folders, the file error.php may contain more info (at least you know Joomla works! find more info therein)
check out your webserver error log. (find more info there)