Normally for password recovery we can tell to WordPress that send it to us as registered mail to the user. It is easier and less cumbersome than the alternative which we will describe below.

Why not use the e-mail route for recover lost password?

In this case the scenario was as follows:

• Old version of WordPress
• Moving to new server
• Do not have the admin password
• The password recovery via email could not be executed because he was disabled the server option

In this case, as we had control of which was moving hosting to installing WordPress, phpMyAdmin could be accessed from the database.

Steps

First, obviously, we need to access to phpMyAdmin and edit our Wordpress database. Then we need to know is not enough to catch the table where users are stored because the information password is encrypted.

To WordPress 2.5 passwords were encrypted with a method called MD5, however, from then on the encryption method changed to Portable PHP password hashing framework, or phpass, so we need to have a tool that can convert human-readable text on a phpass password you use like this: the WordPress password hasher. Thing that's going to put the new password you will want to the tool and get the encrypted version.

Copy the encrypted back to phpMyAdmin. We called wp_users table, then you have to find among registered to admin and the password field (user_pass) insert what we brought to the clipboard. Save the changes to the table and return to wp-login.php friendly where we put our user: admin and password human readable