Using Joomla

Recover Your Admin Password

We hope that you’re reading this to learn how to reset your admin password in case you forget it and not because you already did. Technically, there is no way to actually “recover” the administrator password since passwords in Joomla are encrypted using a “salted” MD5 hash before they are saved in the database. However, there are two ways to reset your admin password—the easy way and the hard way.

The Easy Way

Open your browser and navigate to http://www.<yourwebsite>.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=reset.

Enter your email address and click Submit. Joomla will send you an email containing a special code called a token. The token will confirm that you are the owner of the account. Using the token, you will be able to reset your password.

The Hard Way

Resetting your password the hard way has a bigger potential to break things, but this is your only option if the easy way doesn’t work. It requires a higher level of technical expertise:

1. Log in to your web-hosting control panel. This might be cpanel, but if you don’t know what it is, you should contact your hosting provider.

2. Find and open phpMyAdmin, the tool for managing MySQL databases.

We are going to execute some variation of the following SQL against your users table. Before blindly executing the SQL, please read the explanations of fields you may need to change:

UPDATE jos_users SET password=MD5('usingjoomlabook.com') WHERE username='admin';

jos_users

If you have chosen not to use the default database prefix ...