Wordpress is an elegant blogging platform.  Wordpress allows you to blog easily.  But it also allows you to extend the platform very easily.  You can find massive amounts of free themes readily available.  And the amount of plugins is almost bewildering.  You can find plugins to handle feeds, adsense, spam filters, etc.  If you can imagine it, the Wordpress community has probably developed it.  One of the hurdles in getting Wordpress going, however, is just installing it.  This can be intimidating to the novice.  We offer affordable web hosting for Wordpress and so we want to show you how to install it quickly.

First things first.  To install Wordpress – you have to have a linux hosting account.  You cannot install Wordpress on a Windows hosting account.

Alright, the first thing you will want to do is head on over to Wordpress and download the zip file.  You will need something like Tugzip to extract all the files.  Once you have extracted all the files, you should have a bunch of files and folders sitting somewhere.  You should see folders like wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes.  Okay, here’s where it gets fun.

Now, you will need to download all of these files to your web hosting account.  Note, that these files should not be in a folder like “wordpress.”  They should be in the root folder for your host.  This will allow Wordpress to be served up straight on your domain like http://www.mydomain.com.  If you put them in a folder, it would be served like http://www.mydomain.com/wordpress.  Okay, now you have your files uploaded to your hosting account.  Now, you need to set up the database for your wordpress installation.

Simply create a database in your hosting account management interface.  Call it something easy like “wordpress” and give it a strong password.  Please don’t make the password something like “wordpress” or “password.”  Hackers will guess that in 5 minutes.  Now, you have your files uploaded and your database created.  Now, we need to tell the Wordpress install where all this can be found.  To do this, open up wp-config-sample.php in a document editor like notepad.  Don’t open it up in something like Word because it may mess it up.

Okay, when you open up that file you will see this at the top:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’);    // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’);     // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Now, you want to put in your database name where it says ‘putyourdbnamehere’  So, in our example we would put this:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);    // The name of the database

Now, you will put in the database username in the next line.  You put this in when you created the database.  If you forgot, just look at your hosting account and the database details.  Now, put in your database password.  Finally, put in your host in the line that says:

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

Of course, we fall into that 1% chance where you put something other than localhost.  It will be something like secureserver….  You can again find this in your database details.

Now, and this is important, save this file as wp-config.php not wp-config-sample.php.  Now, upload this to your hosting account.  Okay, you’re almost done.

Now, go to http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php  Obviously, replace “mydomain.com” with whatever your web site address is.  Now, walk through the installation wizard.  This takes less than a minute.  And write down your admin password at the end.  Once you login, you can go to your profile page and change that horrid password there.

*** The Lazy Man’s Wordpress Installation***

Now, if this sounds too complicated, we also offer auto-installs on all our hosting accounts.  You can find Wordpress in the Value Applications package.  Remember, you need a linux hosting account for Wordpress to be available.  This auto installer will install Wordpress in just a few minutes.  All you have to do is answer a few questions and you’re off.  Gotta love it

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