If you’re an admin of a website and you forgot your password and the “forgot your password” email isn’t getting to you — let me show you how to change it manually.

Joomla, WordPress, and phpBB all use what is called MD5 encryption to store the password in the MySQL database for the website.  To update it, run something like this from your mysql command prompt or from the SQL box in your phpMyAdmin:

For WordPress, if my username is “admin” and I want my new password to be “hello1980*” then I run this:

update wp_users set user_pass=MD5('hello1980*') where user_login="admin";

or for example with phpBB, if my username is “Roger” and i want my new password to be “new#12345″ then I run:

update phpbb_users set user_password=MD5('new#12345') where username="Roger";

I hope that helps!