From time to time the little gremlins hiding deep in the blog box tend to play little tricks and you find yourself unable to login. You then hit the lost password button but they in turn chew up the notification email – Now you are left with no access to your admin area, admin has a new password of which you have no idea what it is.

So what do you do? – 2 things I should think!

1. is – Paniccccc!!!!!   or
2. follow the simple guide bellow and take back what is yours from those little nasty gremlins

How? – Well here’s one I prepared earlier kinda graphic (home made ) walk through for you.

I am going to assume that you know how to access your database via the phpMyAdmin located in the control panel (cPanel for most of us).

Login to your phpMyAdmin panel and locate your database – figure A. You can also select it via the Databases tab.

A screen showing the list of your database tables will be displayed. Locate the table named wp-users (fig.B) then click on the browse table icon (fig.C)

This will take you to another screen displaying the list of users – in my case there is only one and that’s admin. In the column title user_pass you will see a string characters (fig.D) and on the left side you’ll notice a pencil icon (fig.E)

Now click on the pencil icon, this next screen is where we are going to edit the user password and create a new one.

Make sure you are making the changes to the right field. See (fig.F). The string value (fig.G) represents the current password so we need to delete it out of the field to make way for a new one. Once deleted just write in the new password, don’t worry about the strings for now – see (fig.H)

With the new password in place we are now ready to finalise the changes and save. Click on the drop down (fig.I) and in the list select the MD5 marker (fig.J) – once you are satisfied that the screen looks like the one above, click on the “Go” button (fig.K). This will save our new password and return us to the screen similar to the one above with (fig.D) & (fig.E) but this time with a new set of strings representing the new password.

We now have a new password for the user admin and are ready to log back in and start battling those little gremlins, vanquish them so they never have the audacity to mess with our password again .

At this point you now need to investigate why you lost the ability to login with the original credentials and why the reset password email did not show up. This can be due to a number of reasons and that’s another story – maybe a future post will shed some light on the topic.