I’m Paul, but after one click I could be even You

Certainly, to test the various permissions of Joomla you are using fake accounts, from now you can do it in another way. So you can see exactly what the user sees the list of specific users of your website. You may be in part a spy or “god” of your website – for free.

Switch User Plugin

By simply clicking a button, an administrator can switch to a different user without logging in and check their permissions or troubleshooting problems.

switch user admin demo In normal way it wasn’t possible to do that because each user must be represented with a single record which contains the username and password, other meta data and some permissions settings. The passwords are stored using a one-way MD5 hash which prevents recovering the password. But you can reset the password by editing the password field in the database. That’s way none of administrators even Super Admin can not see a user password like he see username, without change it. This new feature is extremely practical if you need to login as another user since you don’t have to expose/change their passwords!

After instalation you should enable the plugin in the plugin manager. Now you can switch back to the user manager. You will see some new icons (that blue one) in the first column behind every user name. If you click on it – you will be automatically logged in as a particular user.

An alternate method to login as user was copy and paste the password hash from another user (to which you know the password) over to your admin user. You’ll then be able to login as the user using that password.

This feature is well known in other systems like Typo3 and Contao, now it could be in your Joomla instalation.

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This article was first published December 6th, 2011