Nate Bargatze once observed that his neighborhood handyman had a business card that said confidently, “How hard could it be?” I know enough about the latest version of WordPress to be dangerous – to myself and others. So when a customer asked me to make a WordPress site exactly like their old site on a new domain, of course I said, “Sure. How hard could it be?” Copy and paste, right? Well, not exactly.

The existing site runs on an earlier version of PHP code. The latest WordPress installation uses the latest PHP. Using files from the existing site to build the new site meant updating everything to PHP 8. I know how to how to feed pages into Anthropic’s Claude A.I. engine to make those updates, but the process was going to take me weeks, and when I say, “weeks”, I mean months, while I work on other stuff.

So, rather than start by installing the latest WordPress release (6.9) and then layering in the old look and feel, called a “Theme,” I decided to work backwards, doing a literal copy and paste of the existing database into a new one on the new domain, and another copy and paste of the operating system and theme files.

Then, I could go into the database and make any updates right in the database files. Note it’s not the recommended method whatsoever. Why did I do this? The new site worked fantastically well from the visitor’s perspective. The pages looked good. The navigation worked perfectly. There was only one problem: all the usernames and passwords I needed to login to the “backend” of the site – where you can do the editing using WordPress’s handy site editor – didn’t work, at all. And my attempts to reset passwords got me nowhere.

Now a WordPress developer, someone who works with PHP all the time, would have a much better idea of the glitches that were making it impossible to get into the site editor. Well, I am not that guy. But as you already know from the title of this post, there is a “guy” who knows all about every version of WordPress, and every version of PHP. His name is Claude.

Claude solved my problem in roughly 20 seconds.

Here’s what I asked:

I have a WordPress site at [example].com that I built by copying the database and files for the site at [old-example].com Because I built it as a copy, without actually going through the WordPress installation process as discussed here. I can’t seem to login with the usernames and passwords found in the tables of the SQL database. How can I get a username and password to login to [example].com?

Before I could even grab a second cup of coffee, Claude gave me not one, but three, options to fix things, with varying degrees of difficulty. Actually, the options were all examples of copy and paste! You just had to know what tools to use, and Claude explained what those were and exactly how to use them.

I had already tried the second option he gave me, so I tried the first, and BOOM, problem solved. I didn’t even need to mess with the third option, which was the most technical. (But, again, it was copy and paste into a database editor called “phpMyAdmin,” an app that’s readily available in any web hosting website.)

Why use Claude instead of ChatGPT? Aside from the question of which company has an inkling of a moral compass, Claude simply did a better job of explaining things in terms I could understand. Try pasting my rambling prompt above into ChatGPT and you’ll see what I mean. It makes a lot of assumptions about my level of understanding when it comes to databases and tools used to modify them.

In addition to the three options, Claude gave me a bunch of other suggestions for related issues to check on and fix, things I would not have thought of. As a WordPress expert, Claude knows how to address a website’s PHP programing as a whole, like a good mechanic who can see that your tires are worn when you bring your car in for an oil change.

Kudos to Claude. I’ll definitely be going back to “him” the next time I get stuck with WordPress, PHP, and whatever else hangs me up – like how to do without dating apps?