Debugging the ribbon

Question

I've inherited a farm where previous "admins" decided to make undocumented changes to the file system to protect users under the guise of governance. This meant removing ribbon options like Workflow settings and anything related to Sharepoint Designer.

I was able to acquire a stock CMDUI.xml file from an untouched farm and replace that in our farm where modifications were made. IIS was reset, browser cache was cleared and the buttons do not reappear.

This leads me to believe there might be customizations elsewhere. What other files in the hive have an influence over the ribbon that I can check? Would ONET alterations cause this?

Note there is a custom master page, however this happens on sites without it too, as well as freshly created site collections. There are no user controls or custom javascript or CSS being introduced in the master page that affect the ribbon.

Edit: I've reviewed Andrew's article on MSDN and none of this is being employed in the farm, leading me to believe this is all file system driven.

Answer 1

First check the source of the affected page in browser. If it does not contains buttons then they are removed on server side using HideCustomAction, custom control added to the page or masterpage, CMDUI.xml, ...

If the button definition is in the page source but is not visible then it's done by JS. Each button has it's own ID like Ribbon.Library.Settings.ManageWorkflows-Large. So as the next step i would search all JS files in SP hive containing e.g. Ribbon.Library.Settings.ManageWorkflows.

Answer 2

As far as I know, site definitions won't affect ribbon rendering, JavaScript will. You'll find bunch of JavaScript files affecting the ribbon rendering, such as CUI.js , can you verify they are unchanged?