Some of our customers in China are facing the fast employee turn over. We did provide them a full web design service including a CMS implementation. In some of the project we are using Joomla! 1.5 , a very well known CMS and especially adequate for multi-language website supporting chinese.

We got a call from a customer having the person in charge of their website, in this case the marketing manager, leaving the company. And of course he “forgot” to give the administrator password.

So here is the easy way to reset Joomla! administrator password :

- Simply access to the hosting panel. Use your control panel file editing or use a FTP program.
- Edit the file : plugins/authentication/joomla.php , and find :

if ( $crypt == $testcrypt) {

- Change this line by :

if ( true /* $crypt == $testcrypt */ ) {

- Et voila ! Now you can login with you super administrator user, without any password, and change the password directly from the administrator control panel

What we have done it’s simply removing the authentication in the Php code. Of course don’t forget to change back the line to

if ( $crypt == $testcrypt) {

And we have another happy customer in Beijing !