Getting locked out of DNN's login page

One common accident while developing DNN portals is to change DNN's default login page through the Site Settings page. This is ok, as long as the new page you set contains a user login module. But if the new page does not, you usually get "locked out" of DNN, not being able to login since there is no way to get to the login page again.

Here are two simple ways to overcome this:

1. If you have access to the DNN database, locate the Portals table and change the LoginTabId field to NULL. That way, DNN will be forced to serve the default login page. (The value you'll see in this field will be the tab id of the page you accidentally specified in the Site Settings page). Alternatively, you can run the following query using Query Analyzer or Management Studio (for SQL Server 2005): Update Portals Set LoginTabId=null Where PortalId=xx (where xx is your portal id - if you only have one portal then you should specify 0).

2. If you do not have access to the DNN database, you can use a solution provided by John Mitchell, right here. John provides a page which you can upload on your site. This page does the dirty work of updating the DNN database for you in order to be able to see the login page again.