[Joomla] Can't Edit, It's Locked!

Have you seen this lock image from your Joomla backend?

This means that a certain entry is being use by someone or was used by someone and haven't been properly close the entry. You know, that red Close button at the top right of your screen?

The obvious solution is to call that someone and tell him/her to open it and close it properly. Simply as that. But! What if you badly need to update that entry and the dimwit who locked it wasn't around? Will you wait for that person to show up?

If you have access on site's database then you may not need to wait for that person. (Yey!) You could do some magic on some tables to unlocked the entry.

Here's how to do it:
- open table of where your entry was saved
- locate the menu which was locked
- edit it (click the small pencil image at the left side)
- look for the checked_out column/field
- change whatever number there into zero (the number there is the user ID of the user who locked it)

Joomla 1.5 Table reference:

Menu	open jos_menu
Article	open jos_content
Module	open jos_modules
Plugin	open jos_plugins

Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5 Table reference:

Menu	open jos_menu
Article	open jos_content
Module	open jos_extensions
Plugin

Note: I'm using PHPMyAdmin