When installing Plone using one of the provided installers (i.e. not installing from source), a default installation contains a single manager user called admin. This user has an automatically generated password, and is actually a Zope Manager. As such, this user is managed not by Plone, but by Zope itself. If you set up Zope and Plone manually, you will have created an administrator user during installation.

Regular users inside the Plone site can change passwords via their preferences screen. The procedure described in this howto is only necessary if you want to change the password for the root admin user.

Assuming you have a user called admin, here is how to change the password:

• Enter the ZMI root, this will be platform/installer dependent:
• For Plone 2.1.x on OS X, use http://localhost:8282/manage or check "QuickStart.txt" in the root install directory
• For Plone 2.1.x on Windows, use http://localhost:8080/manage or check the port settings of the Plone Controller application
• If you are running Zope on a different server, substitute its name for localhost.
• Change the password for the admin user in the acl_users folder in the root
• Close all browser windows
• Start your browser again
• Log in with the new password

This is necessary because you can not simply log out from HTTP authentication in a browser. Zope does provide an unviewable page that you can visit in order to invalidate your HTTP credentials: browse to /manage_zmi_logout and hit cancel when prompted. This will also log you out.

If you installed Plone from an installer, and you are wondering what the default password is, have a look for the file admin-password.txt under your default Plone instance installation directory.