Sometimes, you feel the urge to clean up your system and disable unnecessary plugins or you may have the need to disable plugins to figure out where a javascript conflict comes from. Although this is not a bad habit, you need to know which plugins need to stay active. One of those plugins is the User - Joomla! login plugin.
You would expect that Joomla protects users from locking themselves out from the system. Well, not really. If you disable the plugin that handles the login function, you are toast (well temporarily). One would think that the plugin only manages the front end login function. Well, it is also manages the admin login. If you disable the plugin, you cannot login in the back-end as admin as well, even while your password is correct.
This is how it should look like: the User-Joomla! plugin is enabled:
This is was brought us into trouble: the plugin is not enabled and now we cannot login to enable the plugin. A catch 22 Joomla style:
The solution is to make a change in the tables. Follow the steps below and you should be able to login again:
Step 1: Go to the Cpanel and select phpMyAdmin
Step 2: In phpMyAdmin, select the table that belongs to the Joomla website where you cannot log in:
Step 3: Look for the table x_plugins:
Step 4: Open the table x_plugins with the edit button (do not click on the delete button!)
Look for the value in the column "published" in the row of "user Joomla!" and insert the number 1. Save the table and log in your site.
