Lost your admin password? Need in to the WP admin but client hasn’t given you access? If you can access the database directly–easiest using a tool like PHPmyAdmin–you can give yourself whatever access you need. ¹

Locate the right database–if you have FTP, looking at the wp-config.php file at the root of your WP installation is the fastest route. Otherwise, if you have multiple WP installs, check out the options table to match urls and make sure you’re looking in the right database.

In your wp_users table, you insert a new record:

1. user_login –username to access WordPress
2. user_pass – password – be certain to select MD5 from the phpMyAdmin Function dropdown menu; it’s stored encrypted)
3. user_nicename – how you’d like to refer to yourself, not login
4. user_email – email for this user
5. user_url – optional
6. user_registered –  just select a date
7. user_activation_key – leave this blank
8. user_status – leave this set to 0
9. display_name – what displays, can be same as nicename

Note the user ID, as you’ll need it for the next steps.

To give yourself access permissions, head on over to insert a record into the wp_usersmeta table.

1. umeta_id - automatically generated
2. user_id – ID of the user you just created
3. meta_key –  wp_capabilities
4. meta_value copy and paste this:

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Insert another row, with this information:

1. umeta_id - automatically generated
2. user_id – use the ID you created
3. meta_key – insert wp_user_level
4. meta_value – insert 10

Save your work and go log in!

1. Big hugs and kisses out to DNA Web Agency for this uber-helpful information lifted for this tutorial.

If you”ve got a WP installation on a server not running under suPHP (i.e. requiring some folders set to 777 permissions), you may find your WP requests FTP info to do any updates, and get miscellaneous errors even with this info provided.¹ The AutoFTP plugin can help by saving the FTP credentials, but you may still see the errors. I did.

In addition to being annoying, this  can also be confusing for some webmasters. Since it’s a lousy idea to make your entire wp-content folder world-writable to allow for easier plugin updates, let’s look at a better solution:²

First, let’s add some protection for your wp-config.php file to your .htaccess file:

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Verify your “wp-content” folder permissions are set to 0755.

Then, chmod your wp-config.php file to 0644.

In your wp-config.php file (at the root of your WP installation), add the code below. Be sure to provide the correct paths for your server, and do not add a port to your FTP host:

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This should take care of the requirement to enter FTP information for every automatic update, and eliminates those annoying “cannot copy file” and “cannot move file” error messages when trying to do auto-upgrades of WP and plugins.

1. Why not run under the more restrictive permissions provided by suPHP? Maybe you want to run opcache  like e Accelerarter that requires a different configuration, for example.
2. Thanks to “detroiter” for this solution.

TimThumb is a cool little thumbnail script in vogue for WP theme designers. It’s also notorious for not playing nicely with WPMU. Specifically, the rewrite magic used to run WPMU chokes the script in generating the thumbnail, as it’s looking for “/files/date/filename.ext” instead of “/blogs.dir/X/files/date/filename.ext”–where X is the $blog_id variable.

This is easy enough to fix if you want to hardcode your path into the script, but what if you want to set up a theme on WPMU that utilizes the script and open it to more than one blog? Maybe you’re a Thesis fan, perhaps? Well you can.

Please note: This technique requires hacking the timthumb script and as such, it’s never going to be an ideal solution. However, since many WP themes have timthumb deeply integrated and WPMU admins may well want to make such themes available to their users without requiring a users themes plugin, this IS an option that will allow multiple users to access a single version of the script and have it work properly.

Here’s how:

Towards the top of your script, you’ll need to include the wp-blog-header.php file.  This allows you to access WordPress variables from within the external script. This path worked for the Thesis theme setup, where the timthumb script, “thumb.php,” is located in the folder “/wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/scripts/” – you will need to adjust the path as appropriate to go from your actual script location up to the root of your WPMU install.¹

require_once('../../../../../wp-blog-header.php');

From this:

$src = get_document_root($src) . '/' . $src;

To this:

global $blog_id; $src = get_document_root($src) . '/wp-content/blogs.dir/'. $blog_id.'/' . $src;

And from this:

// check for unix servers
 if (@file_exists($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/' . $src))

To This

global $blog_id;    // check for unix servers
 if (@file_exists($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] .'/wp-content/blogs.dir/'. $blog_id.'/' . $src))

That’s it. You now should have thumbs showing up where they belong!

Troubleshooting quick tips:

• If you get an “failed to open stream: No such file or directory” error, then your path to wp-blog-header file is probably off.
• If you’re getting a “file not found” error, trying replacing the $blog_id variable with a hardcoded number of the blog id to see if the problem is in your code itself or in accessing the variable.

1. Code note: There are probably better ways of doing this. I am not a programmer; I am a hack. Feel free to share your wisdom in the comments. Also, I’m squishing the declare global of $blog_id for these two functions we’re editing into the same line as the new code in the interest of keeping line numbers consistent. If that bugs you, then adjust as required.

Allowing people to set up blogs for WordPress MU at blog.domain.tld requires installing your WPMU in the site root and setting up wildcard DNS. In setting up my first WPMU, I ran across this tutorial by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, linked from the WordPress MU docs.

Since I’m not the queen of DNS or anything, I checked with my admin folks to make sure I got the Virtual Host entries correct. I found out this is extremely easy to do if you have a cPanel setup.

Here’s How from my SysAdmin:

To add wildcard DNS and vhost settings in one swoop, simply add a new sub domain to the account and name it ‘*’ (the asterisk character). Make sure it’s document root is pointed to the same directory that your WordPress MU is setup in and cPanel will add everything else to all of the configuration files.

Sure enough, worked like a charm, took 30 seconds, and didn’t require anything scary like restarting Apache–there is no time that runs slower in the time-space continuum than waiting for httpd to restart, man.