title: How to bypass wordpress login screen
body: <p>Basically i want to auto login the user in wordpress, when he clicks on a link in his email, that bears a parameter of either user id, username or email.</p>
  
  <p>I went researching where the Wordpress stores the session information after login.</p>
  
  <p>In my theme's <strong>header.php</strong>, when i put: </p>
  
  <p><code>&lt;?php print_r($_COOKIE); print_r($_SESSION); ?&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>and logged in as <strong>admin</strong>, i got only this one array of <strong>$_COOKIE</strong>, as wordpress does not use sessions internally.</p>
  
  <pre><code>Array
  (
      [wordpress_test_cookie] =&gt; WP Cookie check
      [wordpress_logged_in_80d2ab9fd1f16a2a89ddb8a5553b4463] =&gt; admin|1391841132|58e4ae330b4ca7aef9d6a8ffa3c3a1fb
  )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also compared the database dumps before and after login, and there is no change.
  From this, i came to the conclusion that Wordpress stores the session data in the form of cookies.</p>
  
  <p>Now i would like to bypass the login screen of Wordpress, when the user clicks on the link in his email.</p>
  
  <p>I want to know what data is stored inside the above array of cookies.
  So i can create my own data dynamically and push it in the <strong>$_COOKIE</strong> array, to auto login the user.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone throw some light on this? I am not interested in trying any plugins. I want to do it manually for now.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: I came across <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/53503/can-i-programmatically-login-a-user-without-a-password/128445#128445"><strong>this question</strong></a>, that talks about programmatic login of a user, if we just know his username.</p>