Ryan Malesevich is taking a break from his look at some handy WordPress packages to share a small series on how to move from using MD5 hashes out to SHA-1 hashes for passwords in a MySQL database. He's posted part one today.

What if you're using MD5 in your web application and want to switch over to another encryption method. It's actually not that hard and I plan to cover them in this multi-part tutorial (I know I planned on writing this months ago, but it's better late then never). In this first part I plan on going over updating the database structure and a 'pseudo-code' of what will need to be done.

As mentioned, he gives the outline (pseudo-code) of how the process will work - basically, creating an SHA1 hash of the MD5 and the username in a "newpassword" column added to your database.