Recently, I’ve found that I’ve needed access to an Omeka admin dashboard without a previous admin user on the site. Installatron makes it easy to log into sites like WordPress automatically but they don’t offer this option within Omeka or other applications.
We’ve been able to figure out a way to access the site through the dashboard directly from the database. This method relies on receiving an email reset to confirm the password, but what happens when you don’t receive the email? Well, let me teach out!
Omeka Login
Once you’ve added the user to the Omeka database following the steps listed above, you’ll want to request a password reset.
This generates a user activation link that we’ll need to get to the password reset screen. Once you have the login email, you’ll want to move to the database in PHPMyAdmin.
PHPMyAdmin
In PHPMyAdmin, you’ll want to navigate to the users table. We’ll need to get the user ID of thecurrent user you just requested the password reset for.
In this case, it’s user ID 1, but it may be different for your install.
Next, navigate to the users_activations table. This table holds all the active Password resets for each user. 
You’ll want to grab the text in the URL box next to the corresponding user_ID we got from the users table. Make sure you’re looking at the user_id section on this table as the id might be the same.
In the Browser
After you have that URL snippet, you’ll want to move back into the browser. We’ll need to craft out the URL from the Omeka site. You’ll go to the admin login, in this case, mine is currently at https://reclaimtest.meredithhuffman.com/admin. Next you’ll want to add the code /users/activate/u. This will create part of the password reset link. Finally, add the URL box we got from the users_activations table. So the full URL should look like this: https://reclaimtest.meredithhuffman.com/admin/users/activate/u/1140c618248acc34c9bdb924eafae99b62622b80.
Then load the page and you should see the password reset!
This method is super handy to get access to help troubleshoot, especially if you want to prevent back and forth between the person. I’m all for limiting any unnecessary communication.