How to Recover a Lost Administrator Account

Created OnMarch 14, 2019

bySteve Burge

Have you locked yourself out of the WordPress admin area by using the the Capability Manager Enhanced plugin?

Don’t worry, the Capability Manager Enhanced plugin stores a backup of WordPress role definitions. You can use this recover access to your site.

Those who are comfortable using phpMyAdmin or another database query tool can do the following:

Locate the wp_options table, where “wp_” is your customized database prefix.
Search for option_name LIKE ‘capsman_backup%’
Use capsman_backup if available, otherwise capsman_backup_initial. Ensure that you are seeing the entire option_value of this row (not just a snippet of it ending in “…”. In phpMyAdmin, click in to “Edit” the row to see the entire option_value.
In another window, search for option_name LIKE ‘%user_roles’
Update this wp_user_roles record with the option_value from the capsman_backup row. In phpMyAdmin, this can be done with the “edit” link. Be sure to clear the entire option_value entry box before pasting in the capsman_backup value.

For future versions, we will also apply role editing safeguards to make it impossible for the Administrator role to be locked out.