Changing Multiple Instances of a Username in WP, Because of My Huge Mistake

byRosanaHart

1.4K followers

Updated 2 years ago

I admit it, I really messed this up.

Here's the story. A number of years ago my husband and a good friend of ours, Owen Geiger, started a new website, with me doing the Wordpress back end work. It's not on my list of websites here because I didn't write much for it. It's natural building blog dot com, modified as you can guess.

As it got going, Owen did almost all the writing in the earlier years, with Kelly throwing in a blog post now and then. I never could keep the guys from putting a whole lot of tags on each post. Oh well.

After a while, Owen moved out of our garage where he had been living. (As I said, he was a GOOD friend). We took him to the airport and he flew to Thailand. He lived there, and sometimes in other parts of Asia, until he got sick with something and died. (Condolences not needed, that was in November 2018.)

We decided to keep the site going, and Kelly took over most of the writing.

My Big Mistake

The old website had maybe eight people with logins... Owen was casual about that.

Well, I'm not. I did write them down in a list I kept, but I dumped most of them. I even took Owen off, thinking there could be various people who had received his username and password from him.

When I did that, the 3,000+ (yes, THREE THOUSAND PLUS) posts he had written had to go somewhere. That wasn't enough to stop me. I probably did it late at night and didn't realize all I needed to do for decent security was change his password. I just put all his posts under my husband Kelly's name.

After I moved my own sites here to WA, I moved this site, first to siterubix and then to its own domain, which we had had forever.

Kelly later told me that he wanted to go back to having Owen's name on Owen's posts. Good friends, yes, but two opinionated guys don't always share the same points of view.

So how to do that? I didn't know offhand. I put it on a list of things to do and kind of ignored it, but every now and then Kelly would remind me he wanted it done.

A Compromise

This week, I tackled it. We didn't have an appropriate backup. I could go to the Internet wayback machine and wade through the old files, and I started out that way. But that was going to take forever. I did think of asking our site support here for help, but I didn't see what they could do, as my error had been before the site came here.

Then Kelly offered a compromise. He said, "I don't care if all the posts before Owen's death are in his name. There are so few that I did back then. I could find them and change them back or I might just leave them in his name."

Okay! So this morning I started going through all the posts before Owen's passing, using Quick Edit to change the author from Kelly to Owen. I had added Owen back as an Admin by then. When I took a break for my sore wrists, I had done maybe 50 of the thousands to do. My life going forward was looking pretty boring.

What Worked for Me

When I returned to my laptop, I googled something about "how to change the author of multiple posts in Wordpress."

BINGO! I found some instructions on one of the sites for WP beginners. First, I increased the number of posts per page from 20 to 100, using Screen Options. Then I went to a page on the back end of the site, one listing posts I wanted to change. There I selected them all, and then chose Bulk Actions above them. I hit Edit, then Select. I ignored all the stuff that then came up except one thing on the right-hand side of the screen, the author's name. Opening that, I changed it from Kelly Hart to Owen Geiger. Then I hit update and I cackled.

Cackling is optional, I think. But I kept doing it.

So it wasn't long until that was all done. My husband thinks I'm wonderful. And I can get back to my memoirs soon. My wrists are done working for today.