I got lucky and was able to reproduce the missing comment editor today.
This occurs in areas where the Main Discussion is disabled. In that case, when creating a User-Created discussion, or a discussion based on an admin-defined Topic, the first-post editor is not displayed when initially creating the discussion.
Fixed in the next release. In
src/addons/vw/vw/_core/controller/ui/discussion/vw.php, find:
Code:
if (empty($this->comment['commentid']))
{
$this->comment['pageid'] = $this->parentnode['pageid'];
AFTER it, add:
Code:
$this->comment['displayorder'] = $this->item['displayorder'];
$this->comment['topicid'] = !empty($this->item['topicid']) ? $this->item['topicid'] : 0;
As for the inability to create new books or areas, have you been tweaking permissions for any other usergroups that you might be a part of? You might be part of a usergroup where some permissions are set to Never.
Is this only happening when trying to write a new chapter (rather than creating a page and adding it to the book later)? It is possible there is a bug and it is letting you choose a "Save to" area that doesn't allow chapters. How many chapters deep is the book already? There are technical limitations on the maximum depth of the outermost book. Regardless of depth, how many books would you say are inside that outermost book? There are technical limitations on the maximum number of books in the same tree (you would be limited to regular pages as chapters thereafter).
You should try to create an access mask for your user in the area you're having trouble (AdminCP > Wiki > Permissions > User access masks) and see what the default values are for your user.
However, it is possible that you are seeing a no-permission message due to an action that is simply not allowed by the software, rather than due to how the permissions are set.