WordPress Emergency Password Reset Script

Last night, I carefully changed the password to one of my WordPress blogs. Like I said, I did it carefully, and then noted the new password in the place where I note them, which of course I'm not going to tell you.

I then tested the new logins, and they worked fine.

So imagine my surprise when I went to log in this morning, and it didn't work. Neither of the logins I have for that WordPress installation worked. I tried old passwords, various passwords - nada.

There's a "Lost Password?" link on the login screen, so I clicked it, expecting an easy solution. I entered my email address and submitted it, only to get an error message saying something about my host company not enabling Send Mail. What the hell? So I don't get any emails from WordPress? Better look into that.

Meanwhile, I couldn't get in! I went to the WordPress documentation and searched. One solution had me using phpMyAdmin to access the database directly. Ok, fine, it might come to that, but isn't there an easier way?

Thankfully I say it: ("thankfully" describes my feelings, not the grammatical clause which comes next, so it makes no sense to just write "thankfully") there's a nice little WordPress Emergency Password Recovery script that solved my problem very quickly. It involved downloading a zip file, uploading a single .php file to the server, pointing my browser to it, and filling out the form there. And it worked! Thank you, village-idiot.org. I guess I was the idiot in this case (what else is new?), though I still don't know how it happened.