Password forgotten?
It should not happen, but it does happen from time to time: The password for the access to a CMSimple_XH installation simply can’t be found anymore. The reasons don’t matter – the important thing is to get back into the system.
What to do?
If you really are the person entitled to access, then the chances are not bad:
1. The forgotten password function
The prerequisite for using this function is that an e-mail address has been stored in the system configuration precisely for this purpose. This process is described under Basic settings.
So go to the login page and click on Password forgotten.
(We assume in this tip that an address has really been stored. If not, then the item Password forgotten logically does not exist either.)
CMSimple_XH will ask you for this email address. If your input matches the stored address, the system will send you instructions to this address, which you can use to get back into the system.
2. Reset password
If you have FTP access to the system, you can download the file cmsimple/config.php. Open this file with a suitable text editor, which can read and write utf-8 without BOM encoded files!
Change the first value in this file as follows:
$cf['security']['password']="\$2y\$10\$TtMCJlxEv6D27BngvfdNrewGqIx2R0aPCHORruqpe63LQpz7.E9Gq";
After saving, upload this file via FTP back to its original location.
From this point on, the login password is reset to test. You can log in with it again and should change this default password as soon as possible!
3. Everything new
As you can see, CMSimple_XH is quite well secured. Strangers can’t get in that easily – as long as the default password has really been changed. If the two methods mentioned above fail, there is nothing left but to set up a completely new system and rebuild everything. Not really a helpful tip – clearly.
Glossary
BOM
BOM is the abbreviation for byte order mark. That's an important concept for platform interoperability regarding many multibyte encodings, e.g. UTF-16 and UTF-32. It is necessary, as different OSs expect those encodings in different byte orders (big-endian vs. little-endian).
But for UTF-8 the byte order is fixed for all platforms, so the BOM has lost it's original meaning. However, it is used by many editors to mark a file as being UTF-8 encoded. That's probably not the best idea, and the Unicode Standard does not recommend using a BOM in UTF-8 encoded files. Often the BOM doesn't matter though, but for PHP files and files that will be include()d by PHP the BOM causes a problem: the BOM will be sent to the browser as soon as the file is processed. As the HTTP response is already started, later sending of HTTP headers will be suppressed, which might cause different malfunctions of the script.
FTP
FTP = File Transfer Protocol
Data transfer protocol in networks that is used to upload and download data to and from the server. In addition, various operations are possible with FTP, such as creating, deleting and renaming directories and files, as well as assigning read and write permissions. To use FTP, you need an FTP program, also called an FTP client.
Login
Login refers to the process of logging in to the CMS. The authentication is done with a login password. After login, you are in the so-called “Admin mode” – also called “Backend”. With the login, the system starts a session, which should be closed after finishing all work with logout (log off).
utf-8
utf-8 = 8-bit UCS Transformation Format
The most commonly used type of character encoding on the World Wide Web.
More about this at Wikipedia.
CMSimple_XH requires utf-8 without BOM.