How to manually change your Wordpress theme

I was working on another blog tonight and for some reason the theme I was using had a problem with widgets.  Soon as I changed a setting in options, I’d get a PHP error which was pretty annoying.  I couldn’t get into the admin at all and figured out a simple way to update the theme manually to at least be able to get into the admin.

The theme being used is stored in the wp_options table in the database.   Simply run these MySQL scripts and your site will be set to using the default theme (it’s based on the theme folder name):

update wp_options set option_value = ‘default’ where option_name = ‘template’
update wp_options set option_value = ‘default’ where option_name =’stylesheet’

Hopefully that’ll save you some time ripping your hair out if you stumble on a theme that trashes your admin.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:13 amand is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How to manually change your Wordpress theme”

  • Deepesh Joseph Says:
    December 30th, 2009 at 2:44 pm

    Thanks for the tip. I actually found an easier way -

    update wp_options set option_value =’classic’ where option_value = ‘philna2′

    In my case, I was having php error with philna2 theme, and I had to replace it with classic. THe above sql will update all occurances of philna2 theme and it worked fine for me.

    Thanks,
    Deepesh

  • Carl Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Nice tip.
    I just changed the value manually in mysql and it worked.

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