Create button is missing in Confluence 5.0.x or 5.1.x

Symptoms

The Create button is missing from the top navigation bar

Diagnosis

First, ensure that you have no customisations applied that may prevent the button to display properly. You can verify that you don't have any applied at:

• Confluence Admin > Layouts

• Confluence Admin > Stylesheet

• Confluence Admin > Custom HTML

Try enabling plugin safe mode to disable third-party plugins that may interact with this behavior.

If none of the above apply, you could be facing this issue. To further verify, execute the following query against your Confluence database:

If the query returns a value above 0, then you are affected by this issue.

Cause

The root cause is yet unclear, however it most probably can be traced back to either an unsupported application server or database server version. Please ensure that you are using supported versions of any of the supported platform components. The source of the problem is a NULL value in the SPACESTATUS column.

Resolution

⚠️ Please note that since the problem is most probably due to the use of an unsupported version of database/application server, the following fix will only remedy the problem with the Create button. We cannot verify if any other functions may be broken, too.

1. Shut down Confluence

2. Create a backup of your Confluence database

3. Execute the following query against your Confluence database:

   1  update SPACES set SPACESTATUS='CURRENT' where SPACESTATUS is null;

4. Remove the following directories under <CONFLUENCE-HOME>:

   1. index/

   2. bundled-plugins/

   3. plugins-temp/

   4. plugins-cache/

   5. plugins-osgi-cache/

5. Start Confluence

6. The create button should already be visible by now. Navigate to Confluence Admin > Content Indexing and press Rebuild