AEM 6.3 Page Properties tabs are broken for author user

Question

I am having an issue only in Prod AEM 6.3 author instance. We have our application extending wcm core v1.

When user is logged in a content-author; and opens page properties; Only Basic, Advanced, Thumbnail tabs are accessible. Selecting other tabs like; Cloud Services; Personalization; Permissions; Live Copy, donot open the tab. Rather stays with already opened tab only.

This is happening only in my production author instance. When I delete my local repository; start a fresh vanilla instance and deploy my code, this issue is not happening.

At certain point, our production author broke. Couldnt conclude it is code, since same code works fine in vanilla instance.

Has anyone faced similar issue? Is there any lead to troubleshoot this issue? All tabs works when logged in as admin. Fails only as author.

Answer 1

Looks like this issue is faced by few others. So posting my finding as answer as well.

This was indeed permission issue. OTB Author group did not have permission to /etc/cloudservices. So opening page properties was throwing error:

11.09.2018 10:24:48.597 ERROR [199.243.161.18 [1536675888296] GET /mnt/overlay/wcm/core/content/sites/properties.html HTTP/1.1] org.apache.sling.engine.impl.SlingRequestProcessorImpl service: Uncaught SlingException java.lang.NullPointerException: null at org.apache.jsp.libs.cq.cloudserviceconfigs.components.configurations.configurations_jsp

I was stuck since I didnt know exact path. Trail n error, figured the missing path and granted permission to resolve.

Bonus Interesting Permission issue: Author group donot have permission to /config/ nodes.

So the RTE plugins were not loading for us coz path was like this:

After lot of digging, found this issue. Fix was to rename /config/ to /configuration/ and add property configPath=configuration to the parent node.