Spam Karma – Hands down one of the best plugins for Wordpress. One of the first things you will notice about Wordpress is comment spam. Comment spam racks up quickly. And this little plugin packs a wallop on that nasty stuff.

FireStats – A nice stats plugin that gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s going on for your blog. You need to know how people to your blog, where they go, and how they exit. This is a nice way for you to see that information right in your blog.

Sitemaps – If you don’t know the value of sitemaps, you need to look into it. This dandy of a plugin generates a sitemap for you and then pings search engines for you. Very, very nice plugin.

ShareThis – Again, if you don’t know the value of social network, boy – have you got some learning to do! But, don’t fret, it’s all good for your blog. This gem gives your users an easy way to submit your content to those social network.

Subscribe to Comments – A great way to keep people coming back to your blog is through comments. An even better way to keep them coming back is to enable way to subscribe to them. Now they can get an email notification when someone else comments.

Secure Form Mailer – Ever need a secure, easy way for folks to contact you? How about an easy to customize form? Dagon has created a plugin that does both. It’s super easy to use and very powerful. Did I mention that it will email you the results of the form – mmmm good.

Adsense Deluxe – So, you want to put ads on your blog?  Well, let me point you to this great plugin.  It will give you an easy way to insert Google Adsense, Yahoo Ads, etc. into your blog posts, sidebars, etc.

Related Entries – Wow, yet another wonderful plugin.  You want to keep your readers on your blog as long as possible.  This plugin offers up related posts to your readers.  They came there for a reason – give some others that may interest them.

Oh, I have more up my sleeve, but they can wait.  This should get you off to a nice blog experience.

The first thing you will want to consider, is getting the Maintenance Mode plugin. This plugin posts a message to users that your site is under maintenance. This is really helpful in times like this. Now, before you do a thing, back up your blog in its entirety. This includes the database and the content. If you have no idea how to backup your database, you’re in luck. Here is a nice guide to help you back up your database via PhpMyAdmin.

Now, go grab the latest version of Wordpress. Unzip the files and upload them to your server. Once it is done, you will have to click on the upgrade link to update your database. If anything goes wrong, you have a nice full backup! Also, once you are done and it is working, make sure you turn Maintenance Mode off.

The official upgrade instructions tell you to turn off plugins and so forth. I don’t like that method and troubleshoot it after the fact if something goes wrong. You may prefer to disable them before. That’s your call.

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