In last week’s post, I wrote about a useful plugin for backing up your WordPress site. Backups are vitally important, especially for those of us who use our sites for professional purposes (for some of us, that includes our courses).
This week, I’d like to make a brief note about another helpful WordPress plugin. Sometimes, particularly if you’re running a WordPress network, you might need to access data about your users (e.g. email address, username, registration date, etc.) That information resides in the wp_users table of your installation’s MySQL database, and it’s a relatively simple matter to export the data from that table to a CSV file that can be imported into your favorite spreadsheet application.
The usual method for accessing the user table (at least in my admittedly limited experience), is through phpMyAdmin, found in the cPanel of many webhosts. There are some circumstances, though, in which you might not have access to phpMyAdmin for some reason, but you still need to extract information from your database.1 What then?
Enter Adminer. Installing it will add a new option in your dashboard that allows you to manage your database from within WordPress itself. The plugin (or something like it) is essential for those who don’t otherwise have access to the database, and convenient for those who’d simply prefer to access it from the WordPress dashboard.
Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin, or suggestions for accessing and managing the WordPress database? Let us know in the comments.
[CC-licensed photo by Flickr user Christine Rondeau]