The famous five minute install

Now, we’ll assume you’ve already given WordPress a spin using the hosted version at wordpress.com, but now you’re ready to dive in and really get the ball rolling with your own, self-hosted install of the software.

First up, let’s make sure you’ve got everything you need. You’ll want to ensure your hosting company (the company that houses your website) has PHP 5.0 or greater and MySQL 5.0 or greater installed. If not, they should definitely update both, as each has been out for some time now, and there’s no excuse to not be using the current, stable version of both.

Now, the steps to get installed:

1. Head over to wordpress.org and download the current, stable version of WordPress (3.0 as of this writing).
2. Unzip that to anywhere on your computer. It will create a folder called “wordpress”.
3. Using your host’s control panel, create a new database for WordPress. Make sure to note not only its name, but also your database connection settings.
4. Open the wp-config.php file, and adjust the database settings to reflect the settings you noted in the previous step. Often, the host will remain “localhost”, but always, the user, database name, and password will need to be customized to suit your configuration.
5. Now upload WordPress to wherever you would like it to live on your server. I recommend keeping it in its own folder, unless you’re creating a new site that will be entirely built on WordPress.
6. Open your browser, and go to http://www.example.com/wordpress/, replacing example.com with your domain, of course.
7. Follow the on-screen installation instructions.

And that, my friends, is it. You now having a working installation of WordPress!

Tags: Wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 9:30 am and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.