Recently we had a client contact us because they couldn’t access the dashboard of their WordPress site. Sometimes this happens because of lost credentials, database corruption, or maybe due to a website hack. In this case it was a simple case of lost credentials. The good news was that they still had their hosting & database credentials which allowed us to help them create a new administrative WordPress user. Below is a simple way to create a WordPress admin ‘user’ when you only have access to the database’s mysql.
Login to the site’s database
Click on the wp_users table (Prefix may be different based on preferences)
Click Insert to add new user
ID – Select a number that has not already been used for another user. You may need to reference the other users in this table.
user_login – This will be the username that you will use to login to the dashboard
user_pass – This will be the password you will use along with the above username to access the dashboard. Once you have inserted this make sure that you select the function MD5 as an encryption type otherwise this will not work
user_nicename – This could be a nickname or another reference to the login username
user_email – This is optional
user_url – This is optional
user_registered – This should be the date that you are adding the new user
user_activation_key – Leave blank
user_status – This needs to be ‘0’
display_name – This will be the name that will be displayed on the dashboard after you are logged in
Click ‘Go‘ button to add the above to the wp_users table
Click on the wp_usermeta table (Prefix may be different based on preferences)
Click Insert to add new usermeta
unmeta_id – This should be left blank
user_id – This needs to be the ID number that you used in the wp_users table
meta_key – This needs to be wp_capabilities
meta_value – for an admin this needs to be: a:1:{s:13:"administrator";s:1:"1";}
Insert another row and add the following…
unmeta_id – This should be left blank
user_id – This needs to be the ID number that you used in the wp_user table
meta_key – This needs to be wp_user_level
meta_value – Make this 10
Click ‘Go‘ button to add the above to the wp_usermeta table
Now you should be able to access the dashboard of your site with the username and password you provided above. Once you are able to access the dashboard make sure that you go to ‘Users’ and then find the new user that you just created. Click on that user and then save that user without making any changes. This will allow WordPress to fill in all of the remaining meta data usually automatically filled out when a new user is normally created in the dashboard.
Reference here
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