Reset Your WordPress Admin Password via phpMyAdmin

Have you forgotten your WordPress Admin password? Did you lose access to your WordPress because you fell prey to the WP password vulnerability and your p/w got hacked? (Problem now corrected with WordPress 2.8.4). Take heart, your password can be reset outside of WordPress by using phpMyAdmin.

CAUTION!

phpMyAdmin allows you to directly edit your WordPress database! You can totally and permanently ruin your WordPress installation and have to start it all over again. While I have attempted to make this tutorial easy-to-follow and and accomplish, I take no responsibility for any problems that may occur from your modification of your WordPress database. If you are not comfortable with attempting to work on your WP database yourself, find someone technically competent to assist you in restoring your password.

When you set up your webhosting, your host likely gave you a login and password to your account. This would be the place where you set up your email addresses and the like. Most webhosting companies use CPanel as an interface. CPanel makes life much easier!

Anyway, you want to log onto your hosting account and find phpMyAdmin and click it.

Here’s what it looks like in my CPanel…

Click on phpMyAdmin to open the program in your browser. If your phpMyAdmin is the current version (as of this writing), you should see this…

Click on your WordPress database. You should see the following…

Scroll down to find the row named “wp_users” and click on the “Browse” icon. This will take you to the next screen…

Find the row for the “admin” user and click on the pencil icon to edit the admin password…

Locate the “user_pass” row in the field column. In the “Function” column of that row, click on the dropdown list and select “MD5″. Continue to the “Value” column. What you will see there is an encrypted version of the current password. Click on it and remove it so that there is nothing in that box. Now, enter the password that you want to use for the “admin” account. Don’t worry that it isn’t encrypted, that will be taken care of automatically. Lastly, at the bottom of this last screen, be sure to clock on “Go” to save your change of password.

Congratulations! You should now be able to log into your WordPress with your new password!

Fix WordPress memory error when upgrading

With the issuing of WordPress 2.8.3 and 2.8.4 a lot of people have run into the dreaded “Allowed memory size error” when you try to run the automatic upgrade for your WordPress. (you did backup everything, just in case, yes?)

Did you get an error something like “Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate …yadda yadda)”? This is likely caused by “too much stuff” in your WordPress, like lots of plugins.

There are a few things to do to try to get past this.

1.) Deactivate most or all of your plugins and then try the automatic upgrade again. That should help most people.

If you are more technically inclined or have someone who can do this for you (like me! )…

2.) In your WordPress root find the “wp-settings.php” file and find this line (around line 13) “define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘32M’);” and increase the memory size to something larger, like “define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);” . Now try upgrading again.

And if that doesn’t fix it so that you can upgrade… Try this!

3.) Find the “php.ini” for your site (this is not a wordpress file, but one from your webhost – you may need to ask them how to make the change, if it’s not readily available to you) and change it to something larger like this “memory_limit = 128M”

You should now be able to successfully upgrade your WordPress!

My WordPress Website Died

Yes, it can even happen to The Web Mechanic!

Recently I thought my website (this website) was running a little slow… but it wasn’t anything that I was concerning myself about very much. Then yesterday, it slowed to a stop! I would try to access a page and my browser would just sit there trying to load the page. I didn’t think it was me, so I contacted my webhost service folks. They could see that there were a bunch of process’ running that were gumming up the works. We both thought it was something spurious but also something to keep an eye on.

Continue reading My WordPress Website Died