WordPress Incorrect Password notification

Cheryl emailed me this morning telling me that her password was no longer accepted by WordPress when she tried to sign in to her WordPress account even though she was sure that the typed the username and password correctly in the login form.

The message displayed to her by the blog was "Incorrect Password" and after making sure that the password that she used was indeed correct, by quickly going through common mistakes such as an activated Caps Lock key or a deactivated Numpad, I began to look into the issue.

I changed the password of her WordPress user account to "test" and  tried to login to the system on my end only to receive the same error message which obviously meant there was another error that I had to find.

Update: Newer versions of WordPress display the following error message:

Error: The password you entered for the username "name" is incorrect. Lost your password?

This did not work as well and the Incorrect Password screen did appear again. I then tried to generate a new password but this was also not accepted. I headed out and performed some searches for a solution and finally found it.

It seems that WordPress is having problems with upper case usernames. Cheryl registered her account with an upper case C. I deleted that account, registered again with cheryl as the username instead and et voila, I was able to login immediately with the account password set in the account. Now, this is obviously only possible if the author has not written any articles yet, as you'd otherwise move all written articles to the default account of the WordPress installation.

This will hopefully help all the other users who use upper case letters in their WordPress usernames only to find out that login in with them does not work.

If you encounter the issue for existing authors, you may want to edit the username in the MySQL database directly instead.

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