Appearance editor missing

A few months ago my ability to access the Appearance > Editor tool disappeared. I have Wordpress version 4.0.1, although I can’t say for certain that the upgrade coincided with my editor disappearing. I went through the plugins to see if one of them was responsible, but nothing was altered. Today I installed the latest update to the Sparkling theme, but the issue wasn’t solved either. Does anybody have any suggestions?

It looks like you are having limited permissions on your WordPress dashboard and it could be causes by many things. First thing things that you can do:

  • Temporarily disable all plugins to see if it does resolve your issue
  • Temporarily switch to another theme such as Twenty Fifteen or other theme.
  • If nothing helps, try to install a new theme to see if you it is allowed and you have access to that feature as well.
  • If not, try to re-install WordPress (no changes or content will be lost). You can do it by going to WordPress Dashboard - Dashboard - Updates - “Re-install now”. If this function throws some errors such as you don’t have permission to do that or other you will need to look at your file permissions via FTP.

Let me know if anything from above helps.