Here’s one. I’ve inherited a website. Right now, it’s held in Wordpress because it seems the previous web developer uses it. The problem (which is a long story - but read their hosting company didn’t like dealing with someone in Australia, so locked him out) is that ideally I need to get into the Admin side of the Wordpress site so I can make changes. I made one change last month (which was a hack to suppress errors) by editing one of the PHP files directly. However, anything else - including changing content - is obviously behind the WP password.

Right now, the client does not have any log in information (I know, I know....), and I’ve been asked about the potential need to move the site from current host to somewhere else. I expect that I could just copy what’s on the FTP server and the database, but I’m not comfortable about doing that without having full access. Something, I know, will go wrong if I attempt to do so.

So, anyone with any idea what I probably need to do to tinker with the database to get a admin access? All I need to do really is change the password - if I can, say, change an email address to mine so that the forgot password request comes to me, not the previous guy, what should help.

Also - I have no idea what version of WP we are talking about. The only clue I can offer is that when the current host updated their PHP version (without any warnings, I am told), the site started throwing a lot of warnings about deprecated functions. So, I expect, not an up to date version.

MY own thoughts are to keep with the current host (as the site in question is going to be retired this year anyway), and try to extract log in details from previous web guy before I do anything big and drastic. Looks like their host is billing quarterly.

Solved. Yay! The client will be happy - just started out with him, and being able to give him a new password for the admin section will please him no end, I think. There’s a distinct lack of control, and really he needs to have a master key incase anyone else gets run over by a bus.

You were not the one driving that bus by any chance?

Here's one for you, though I'm a little late to the party. Any experience with WP hosting with 1&1? I'm tempted by their 99p offer for a basic WP site (here's the link if you want to take a look: http://www.1and1.co.uk/wordpress-blogs). I've been toying with a blog idea that will be pretty heavily focused on writing paired with a few of my pictures (which I can now resize thanks to another thread ). Not looking for anything too fancy, but it should look decent enough. Cheers

We use Wordpress for our site now, used to be Drupal. I find it is easier than Drupal, but still harder than it should be to set up - although we can't do much, we only have editor rights, the marketing agency that set up the site control it.

What I don't like is that every month there seems to be a security flaw in Wordpress or one of its plugins.

As a first step, I'd check the version number of Wordpress and catalogue the plug-ins that it uses and ensure they are all supported and they are all current and suffer from no known flaws - there was a reporting tool last week that suddenly exposed something like a hundred million sites!

I have to re-do my brother-in-laws site sometime this year - he has been threatening to re-work the text for it for over a year. That is, luckily, a small site and I wrote my own "CMS" in a couple of dozen lines of PHP. Much simpler to manage, just write new text files and add them to the menu list.