I’ve taken over hosting for many WordPress websites. Almost always they were designed by someone else and the customer doesn’t have access. So, below I have compiled a few MySQL queries for you to run against a database to create an administrator on a new migrated website.
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Connecting to your MySQL Database
This guide assumes that you have some experience working with MySQL. If you don’t, please contact me using the form below or any social media account! I would love to help you before you obliterate your database.
There are a few ways to connect to MySQL:
- PHPMYADMIN
- MySQL Workbench
- Command Line
Personally, I do all my MySQL queries on the command line as my databases are hosted in Amazon RDS. I’m not going to get into how to execute a query on each of these platforms but the queries below have been tested on each one.
MySQL Queries
First query will create your user. You will need to modify a few sections in this query including the table prefix if you changed it when you installed WordPress. Other things to change will be the username you want to use, your password, your name and email.
insert into `wp_users` (`user_login`, `user_pass`, `user_nicename`, `user_email`, `user_status`) VALUES ('YOUR_USERNAME', MD5('YOUR_PASSWORD'), 'YOUR_FULL_NAME', 'YOUR_EMAIL', '0');
This next query will give your user administrative capabilities. Be sure to modify the tables as needed.
insert into `wp_usermeta` (`umeta_id`, `user_id`, `meta_key`, `meta_value`) VALUES (NULL, (Select max(id) FROM wp_users), 'wp_capabilities', 'a:1:{s:13:"administrator";s:1:"1";}');
And finally, set the user level to 10. While this was deprecated many years ago, I still set it to 10.
insert into `wp_usermeta` (`umeta_id`, `user_id`, `meta_key`, `meta_value`) VALUES (NULL, (Select max(id) FROM wp_users), 'wp_user_level', '10');
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