Installing WordPress
Web development is not for everyone but sometimes things are so easy everyone should know how to do it. Installing WordPress is one of those things.
There are many ways to install WordPress, I am going to cover 2. One will be installing it manually on a local server and the other will involve using CPanel and the one click solution Fantastico.
Installing on a Local Server
For the sake of the post, I am not going to get into installing Apache or phpMyAdmin. I will tell you on my Mac I use MAMP and on my other ‘puters I use either WAMP or XAMP, these are super easy all in one solutions that will install Apache, MySQL and PHP on your local box.
Once you have a server running on your local server you will need to navigate to the phpMyAdmin page, this is located on at http://localhost:8888/MAMP on my Mac you will have to refer to your setups documentation to locate. Once there, you will need to create a database and assign a user that has full CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) rights on this database.
That’s all you will have to do in the phpMyAdmin panel so you can close out of it now.
Now, we need to grab a copy of WordPress, surf on over to WordPress.org and download a copy of it and unzip it.
Now we need to figure out where to put WordPress so that Apache can see it. On my Mac I drop it in the htdocs folder that is inside the MAMP folder in the applications. On Windows, using WAMP it is set by default to the ‘www’ folder inside of the WAMP folder that you will find in the root directory (usually C drive). Your configuration will depend on how you have Apache set up.
Once we have placed WordPress in the right folder, the first thing we need to do is hook it up to our new database. To do this open up wp-config-sample.php inside the WordPress folder, open this in a plain text editor. You will see a page that looks like this:
You will need to edit these settings to the ones you set when you created the database. The username is the name of the user you added to the database, the default user for a Mac is ‘root’ with a password of ‘root’ while Windows default use is also named ‘root’ but the password is set to blank ‘ ‘.
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
to something like this
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'tutorial');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'root');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
After you have set the database settings, you can be done. If you have decided you are done make sure you save the file as wp-config.php in the same location that wp-config-sample.php came from. However, if this site will ever be accessed by an outside computer I highly recommend that you change the Authentication Unique Keys. You can have wordpress.org generate you some to copy and past by navigating here. Another worthwhile security measure is to change the WordPress Database Table prefix to something unique You do that by editing this line of code:
$table_prefix = 'wp_';I recommend something with numbers as well e.g. ‘wp1234_’
That’s it for the hard part. Now the fun begins. Using your browser, navigate to the WordPress install mine is http://localhost:8888/wordpress-test/. If you have everything set up correctly this is what you will see:
Fill in the Blog title and email and hit Install…. that’s it.
You will now see a page like this
Either copy to the clipboard or write down the password and click the button that says ‘Log In’. You will be taken to the WordPress administration where you are free to change the password to anything you like. That’s it for the local install, not that complicated but still a little more technical then the next way.
Installing using CPanel and Fatastico
If you website is on a hosting company’s server, they will have supplied you with an administration panel. There are quite a few different ones that are used by a variety of different providers. I use hostGator, and I really am happy with the service I get. With hostGator they use cPanel which is probably the most common one out there.
Anyways to install WordPress on a hostGator server could not be easier, even if you are not using hostGator the steps will be very similar to these.
First thing is to login into your cPanel account. You will be looking at a page like this:
You are looking for a little icon that looks like this 
Click on it to open the Fantastico panel. Fantastico can be used to install all sorts of goodies on you server. You can see the entire list on the left hand side. We are going to choose WordPress.
From there we are going to choose new installation. Make sure you fill out all the forms and click the install WordPress button at the bottom. That’s it Fantastico takes care of the rest! Pretty simple right?
Summary
Installing WordPress is not a big deal, if you can navigate around your computer and are at all technically minded it should only take you a few minutes to have an install up and running.
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