What did I learn today ?

So you can’t login to your admin area- not as stupid as it sounds, of course if you have literally just forgotten your password then maybe you are silly but how this can happen is that you forgot your password and then decided to use the recover/reset option which will change the password in the wordpress database but then for what ever reason the new password is not emailed to you- so you still are no better off because you still don’t know the password so therefore can’t login- yes you could scream!!!!

But wait help is at hand.

Option 1: Steven has written a couple of scripts that as long as you have ftp access to your blog then you can upload his scripts and use it to reset the password or user name.  BUT read carefully his disclaimer below and remember buyer beware

Steven’s comment

Hey Urshula, here’s those 2 scripts I was telling you about:
change_wp_username.zip.
reset_wp_password.zip.

As advertised it’s not a good idea to leave them up on a server!
I’ve made sure the textboxes are protected against MySQL injections and stuff like that, though if your password has a single or double quotes in it, or any backslashes you may have some problems. Though who uses those characters in a password… honestly!

Option 2: This is another one from Village-idiot.org which does the same thing and works well. Luckily haven’t used it lately But last time I used it worked a treat.

Option 3: Now I’m going to seem like the silly one but I’ve also reset me password directly through the database so if you have access to your database this to can be an option. This site has print screens to help you through this option

Take this blog as an example- I did not need to hand code any html either by hand or in Dreamweaver to get it going. I just

1. turned it on in my web hosting control panel
2. choose a theme from one of the millions of wordpress theme sites
3. uploaded the theme
4. entered in some configuration settings such as the name of my blog “what I’ve learned today” as well as other configurations

And in under an hour I’m an official blogger- woohoo. No html coding from me as the wordpress blog software does everything for me and the millions like me who are using the software which is great because it is dynamic. When I ad a post it is added to the database backend from which all the content is generated dynamically . Which is great and convenient.

When I add a link to the blog roll it dynamically appears on every page I do not manuallly add it ot every page. which is all great.

But as an example of when this can be an issue- because it’s basically one size fits all is demonstrated up in my banner. If you are viewing this site in ie 7 the text “What did I learn today” has the word “today” going over the picture frame which it doesn’t in the browser firefox and which I don’t want it to!!

In Firefox the word today is on a new line which is the way I like it. Now those that know any html will go “just put in a <br /> tag ” which will give a nice single line break between learn and today. But because this is a dynamic site in the source code that creates the page dynamically there isn’t <h1> What I did i learn today <h1/> where I can just insert my <br /> into.

What there is in the code is <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> which dynamically gets out of the database my blog name. And no I can’t enter in the break tag in the configuration because it will render the <br /> literally as a <br />.

Yes there are other work arounds but I just thought this was a good example of a dynamic site and how something that you may think is a minor tweak with dynamic sites can actually be hidden iceberg waiting to suck you in and that free hour you thought you had has just gone down the tube.

Happy blogging

PS: just in case your wondering what is the solution I think the best option is to modify the style sheet to reflect the presentation you want. I could replace the dynamic php code with static html but this would mean I’d have to do it every time i wanted to change the name of the blog in the code rather than the back end of blog. And since I change the name of the blog as often as my proverbial undies I think leaving the name dynamic is a good option.