Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Appendix E. Tips and Tricks

Having used Joomla since its inception, we’ve collected a variety of helpful tips along the way. Here are a few we think are pretty important to have in our tool bag.

How to Recover Your Admin Password

Yes, it happens to all of us at some point or another. We get locked out of our own home and need to find a way back in. The procedure for Joomla 2.x and 3.x is a little different than it was in Joomla 1.5. There are two ways to do it, and we’ll start with the easier of the two. You’ll need FTP access to get to the configuration.php file.

1. Use an FTP application to connect to your site and go to the root folder. You should see all your Joomla files there, including the configuration.php file.
2. Download this file and open it up in a text editor (e.g., Notepad++, TextWrangler, or Sublime Text). Make sure this is a plain text editor that doesn’t convert the file to RTF or some other text format (don’t use something like Microsoft Word for this).

3. Add the following line to the end:

   public $root_user='myname';

   Note

   Replace myname with a username for which you know the password and save the file.

4. Delete the configuration.php file on the server and upload this new file. You will now be a Super Administrator and can log in to make any necessary changes, including resetting the Super Administrator password.
5. Once you’ve completed your changes and gained access, try the automatic removal of the line you added to the configuration.php file. This has mixed reliability, ...