Fixing the WordPress login issue

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was having some big troubles with some of my blogs. There was a bug in WordPress version 2.6.1 that was allowing crafty hackers to create a user account in your log and then with a well written piece of code, they could force a reset of the admin password.

Most people were able to get past the bug by simply upgrading to version 2.6.2. Unfortunately, a simple upgrade didn't do the trick for me on all by blogs. on 3 of them, I was unable to complete the upgrade because I wasn't able to log in to my admin section and perform the necessary upgrade. So I was caught in a catch 22. I needed to log in to my admin section to upgrade, and I needed to upgrade to log in to my admin section.

This morning, thanks to the suggestion of one very helpful WordPress savant, I was finally able to solve the problem for the remaining blogs. I figured I would share with you the steps I took in order to complete the upgrade.

1. Download a backup of all my wordpress files to my hard drive.
2. Use PHPMyAdmin to make a backup of the current database.
3. Upload the new 2.6.2 WordPress files.
4. Use PHPMyAdmin, Open the options table, edit the “active_plugins” record.
     – Copy the list of active plugins, paste in to a notebad for reference.
     – Delete everything in “value” portion of the active_plugins record and hit save.
5. Log in to your WordPress admin section.
6. Upgrade the WordPress the database.
7. Log in to your WordPress admin secton (if you were kicked back out like I was)
8. Upgrade and activate the proper plugins.

That's it.

After everything I went through last night dealing with this bug, the solution ended up being pretty simple. 10 minutes from start to finish and I'm back to blogging rather than bug chasing.