Virginia Web Designers: Joomla, Drupal, Open-Source, CSS, and PHP Northern Virginia / Maryland / Washington DC web designers

Recovering super-admin access to Joomla

If for some reason you can’t figure out the superadmin login or password, use phpMyAdmin and go into the jos_users table of your database.

Locate the superadmin user account. It will have a gid (group ID) of 25.

By default its username is admin, but the username may have been (should have been!) changed. It’s a good idea to change it, for security reasons. The “admin” username is the first one hackers will try.

Now, let’s change the password using phpMyAdmin. Edit the user using phpMyAdmin and find the password field. That is MD5-encrypted so we need to think of a new pw and MD5-encrypt it. It should look something like this example:

7da8c7fed439183092er69334b54fe01:UIBWsiwIlkk2wkHCUmC1XxD1tAd1uQgK

You need to generate a new MD5-encrypted password. Do that here:

http://www.iwebtool.com/md5

.. or Google ‘md5 encrypt’ for other similar sites.

Just enter what you want the password to be, and it will tell you the MD5 code for it. Copy that code and put that into the password field in phpMyAdmin. Save.

See if you can log into Joomla and get the full features now using the username you just edited over in phpMyAdmin.

Note that Joomla’s passwords are MD5-encrypted *and* salted, meaning that they have a colon and then a second MD5 string after that. But using an externally generated MD5 string and pasting that in will work, at least for Joomla 1.5.15.