How to install WordPress 2.2
WordPress is an outstanding blogging platform. Heck, I’m using it here. But with its popularity comes another problem. Many people new to web development are wanting to start up a blog and do not have the skills to do so. What follows is a walkthough of a test installation so that you can see the steps required to install WordPress on your server. (psst, it’s really not that difficult)
Downloading the file
The WordPress download page has two different versions that you can download, a zip file and a gz file. Unless you already know what a gz file is, go ahead and download the zip. Unzipping software is built in to WinXP and programs like WinZip or the free 7-Zip make handling zip files fairly painless.
Creating the MySQL database
You will need a MySQL database to hold your blog posts. I wrote a tutorial on how to create a MySQL database in cPanel a few days ago. Other hosting control panels should be similar.
Uploading the files
Take the file that you downloaded from WordPress and unzip it to somewhere safe on your computer. You should see a wordpress folder. Upload the contents of that folder to where you want your blog to be. If you don’t already have an FTP program that you like, I always suggest FileZilla.
Change your permissions (for now)
You will need to temporarily change the settings of the folder where you installed WordPress to allow creation of new files so that the wp-config.php file can be created. On a Linux server this is 777. After the installation be sure to go back and change the folder to 755 so that it cannot be changed.
Browse to your site
Go ahead and browse to where you installed WordPress. You should see a page which looks like the following. The page title says Error, but don’t worry about it for now.
Click on the link to ‘create a wp-config.php file through a web interface’ to continue.
The next page is just informational. Read it if you’d like and then click ‘Let’s Go’.
Database Settings
The next screen prompts you to enter the database settings for your blog. The Database Name field is the name you gave your database when you created it. Be sure that if your host puts a prefix on your database names that you include that prefix as well. The username and password fields are for the user you created to access your database, and the same prefix hint applies to your username as well.
Database host is almost always localhost. Although some hosts, notably GoDaddy.com, have a separate MySQL server rather than localhost. Odds are you can try localhost and if it doesn’t work check with your host.
The table prefix is only needed if you are going to be using the same database for multiple web applications. For example, if you are running one photography blog and one programming blog but only have one database as part of your hosting account you can use prefixes to keep them separate.
Once you’ve entered the database information click on Submit to continue.
If WordPress was able to successfully connect to your database you will see the following screen. If not, then you will need to double check your settings.
Click on ‘run the install’ to continue.
Weblog Title
You will see another informational page that you can skip over. Click on First Step to go on.
For the first step you will enter the title that you want to give your new blog and your email address. Give some serious thought to your title. The blog title will show up in most of your page titles and can have a significant influence on your future search engine traffic.
You generally want to leave the checkbox option checked under your email address. Most people post to their blogs in hope that they will get traffic from search engines. If you don’t want that you can clear the checkbox and WordPress will insert code into the HTML that will tell search engines you don’t want to be indexed.
Click on ‘Continue to Second Step’ to go on.
Your admin information
If you see the following screen you have successfully installed WordPress to your web server.
Be sure to write down the username and password as you will need them to login for the first time. Click on the wp-login.php link and use the username and password to start administrating your new blog.
What’s next?
The first thing I would suggest is changing your admin password. While the password WordPress generates is more secure then the typical password people choose you should pick one that is a different length and uses a full set of characters instead of just 0-9 and a-f. The more complicated your password is the more difficult it will be for a hacker to get in.
Be sure to change the permissions of your WordPress folder back to 755 in case you didn’t earlier.
After that, start blogging. You wanted to start sharing your writing with the world, so get after it.
Help, something went wrong!
Couldn’t get your server to do what it was supposed to? WordPress not working like it’s supposed to? Feel free to post your questions here and I’ll see what I can do to help. WordPress also has a great support board with very helpful members.
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