hello leupold,
thank you for your help,
i don't know why but the last 2 posts are not appearing (although they were approved), anyway, i will rephrase them:
on the online portal, i updated the admin role id in the portals tables and restarted the server itself. now, when i log in as admin, i can see all the admin icons except the admin Tab on the menu (i can see edit page, etc...). when i click on edit page, it says " You do not have access to view this tab within the portal. "
I looked at the tab in the tabs table, i filtered by portal id and found it to be similar to all other admin tabs on other portals.
to mimic the issue, offline, on my localhost, i added a category called testadmin, and assigned it to be the administrator category in the localhost's test portal.
when i logged in after restart windows, it does exactly the same (the icons of admin appear (edit page, etc, edit module), when clicked they give the same message and the admin tab is not showing).
any help is appreciated
ramzi