These are directions for Wordpress but in general these tips should help.
So here is the situation, you are working on a site, you decide you need to change your admin and poof you forget it. Or you lose the little peace of paper you wrote it down on. Whatever your situation, it’s not fun.
For my setup I go into my databases admin panel. Then I open phpMyAdmin for the database of the app I’m working on, in this case Wordpress. Then I find the users table “wp_users” and click on that. Then find “user_pass” and click the checkbox next to it and hit browse. Then in the user pass field I see a long string of gibberish. This is called an MD5 hash. Great so you see an encrypted password, how does that help?
From here you will want to create your own MD5 hash. There are many MD5 tools online to generate MD5’s here is one. Enter what you want the password to be and it will spit out one of those long strings of gibberish mentioned earlier.
Copy that code and go back to phpMyAdmin then select the users who’s password you want to edit click the little pencil icon to “change”. Post the MD5 hash in the user_pass field. Then click go and you are set.
Login to your app and you are a fully fledged admin one again. Have fun!
Guest Editor - Matt HerzbergerHow to recover a site admin password
Friday, July 20, 2007These are directions for Wordpress but in general these tips should help.
So here is the situation, you are working on a site, you decide you need to change your admin and poof you forget it. Or you lose the little peace of paper you wrote it down on. Whatever your situation, it’s not fun.
For my setup I go into my databases admin panel. Then I open phpMyAdmin for the database of the app I’m working on, in this case Wordpress. Then I find the users table “wp_users” and click on that. Then find “user_pass” and click the checkbox next to it and hit browse. Then in the user pass field I see a long string of gibberish. This is called an MD5 hash. Great so you see an encrypted password, how does that help?
From here you will want to create your own MD5 hash. There are many MD5 tools online to generate MD5’s here is one. Enter what you want the password to be and it will spit out one of those long strings of gibberish mentioned earlier.
Copy that code and go back to phpMyAdmin then select the users who’s password you want to edit click the little pencil icon to “change”. Post the MD5 hash in the user_pass field. Then click go and you are set.
Login to your app and you are a fully fledged admin one again. Have fun!
Guest Editor - Matt Herzberger
