Today I went to login to my WordPress admin and suddenly I had no capabilities. I couldn’t access pages or posts or see anything besides what normal subscribers could see. In a panic I logged out and logged back in thinking I screwed something up. Nope, still broke.  Scratching my head I wondered how this could have happened?   No clue, must have been a database hiccup or other random error that aligned things perfectly to strip my privileges and halt me in my posting tracks.  But how do I fix it?  I scoured the web trying to figure out how to word my issue correctly.  Finally, I found an obscure reference for adding a admin user via database. “Ah ha! That should have the information I need!”

So should this ever happen to you, here is how you fix it:

(pre-step: if you aren’t comfortable editing databases.. BACK IT UP! Make sure to save it in case you make a mistake)

1. Login to your Cpanel or hosting admin panel. Find the area that says phpMyAdmin and login there.  This will give you access to the database that holds your WordPress installation.

2. Select your database from the list of databases (if you have more than one.)

3. On the left hand side click “wp_users” , find the username you want to restore to admin access and note the ID #

4. On the left hand side click “wp_usermeta”

5. This next step you’ll have to look at two columns to make sure you have the right entry. Find where the user_id column shows the ID for the user you want as admin AND also has the meta-Key column displaying “wp_capabilities”

6. Click the little pencil icon on the entry you identified above in order to edit it.

7. In the space for meta_value paste this in:      a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}

the above makes all the difference, you know this was your issue if it said a:1:{s:13:”subscriber”;b:1;}

8. Click “Go”, your database should now be updated with the correct admin permissions and  you can login with your full access restored.

I hope this will help someone else avoid the frustrations that I had trying to figure this out.

(Mouse over photo to the left to see original unedited photo)

My last blog post highlighted photo enhancement, now we’ll look more at alterations. When a photo has unwanted clutter or defects it is necessary to alter it with photo editing software in order to direct the viewer’s attention to the subject of the photo. To the left you’ll see a photo that I have altered from its original version. Along with altering to remove clutter I have also enhanced the photo. This is not as hard to do as you might think. For this I used Aperture for Mac which has a variety of built in features to let you manipulate your images. The original picture here is actually a low quality image that was loaded on Facebook, imagine what you could do with a higher quality image!

I’ve also done a video tutorial so you can see the process in which I used to create the final image to the left. Check it out and see what you can do with your own photos. Don’t have a Mac? Try GIMP, Photoshop or Paintshop Pro on your Windows computer.

Want to see in high definition? Click the video to go directly to YouTube and view it there.

Will I be able to update my site myself? Yes! This is one of the many questions that clients are most concerned with when they ask me for a web design quote. This is why I suggest the Merchant Moms shopping cart. I highly recommend this cart for the ease of it for first time users and also the affordability.

I am going to do a series of tutorial videos that demonstrates how easy it is to use this cart and also walk you through some of the features. This video will deal specifically with creating a web links page for link exchanges.