Retrieving Passwords in Wordpress

Passwords are bound to be lost. The options to retrieve them are hence on the rise. The most common ways to retrieve a lost password are to provide the email address or an user id, answer some secret questions or enter some personal information that has been already fed into the system.

With Wordpress, you primarily have just one option. You enter your email address or your username to have a password reset link mailed to your email address. Activating the mailed link in a browser will initiate another email from Wordpress which carries your password.

This option may not work all the time. There are times when your server might not support SMTP service that is required for the email to be dispatched.

We have alternate ways of achieving a password resets, but through the backend. Duh! not the Wordpress backend but your MySQL database backend.

Log into your database backend, you should see something similar to the one below depending on the version that you use.

Click on wp_users table and then hit browse.

You should see something similar to the image shown below. I have disfigured my database’s personal information and in it’s place, you should see some real text. Click on the icon that is marked by a big black arrow. Excuse my graphic design skills, it isn’t too pleasing to anybody’s eyes. :)

An editor where you can change the values of your username and password is open. Note that you will not be able to enter real text as the strings in this database are encrypted by MD5. Go over to a website which converts real strings to MD5 strings. Enter the password of a choice and upon encrypting, you will get your password in MD5 format. For example, if you chose your password as ’superman’, your MD5 string would be ‘84d961568a65073a3bcf0eb216b2a576′. Enter this MD5 string, in your db backend against user_pass field. Hit Go/Save and this should do the trick.

If you have problems in carrying this out, let me know.

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Filed Under: Wordpress

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