How to Install Wordpress: The Basics

in Wordpress for Beginners by Dumitru — October 9, 2009 at 2:30 PM | 0 comments

How to Install Wordpress

So you decided to give Wordpress a try, yes? Great! …so what’s next? Next, we have to install Wordpress.

Before we begin

Now, before we do this, here is what you will need in the process. I recommend you prepare all this before the next step :)

A text editor (Notepad, Dreamweaver, PSPad, etc.)
A domain name
Hosting that supports PHP version 4.3 or greater
Hosting that supports MySQL version 4.0 or greater
FTP access to your hosting
A MySQL database
Access (login & password) for the MySQL Database with full privileges

Let the installation begin!

I will assume you have prepared everything you need to install Wordpress.

Download Wordpress from the official source, don’t go looking for it somewhere else. Download the latest available stable version (at the time of this writing it is 2.8.4)
Unpack the package that you have download to a new directory on your HDD. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to this folder C:\Wordpress.

By default, in the root of C:\Wordpress there will be a file wp-config-sample.php. You have to rename it to wp-config.php

Open the newly renamed wp-config.php in your favorite text editor, for example in Notepad.
You will have to edit a couple of lines, the most important of which are these:
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

This is where you will have to put your database information: database name, database username, database password.
Usually the host is “localhost”, unless your hosting provider specified differently.
While we are at it, let’s take some security measures to better protect our blog in the future. In the same wp-config.php file, let’s edit a few more lines:
define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

To make this easier for you, use the special Wordpress API to generate all 4 secret keys: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/. You can just completely replace the old lines with the 4 newly generated lines. Simple as that.

Below these lines, in the same wp-config.php file, you will see this line:

$table_prefix = 'wp_';

It says that when Wordpress will create the necessary tables during installation, all of them will have ‘wp_‘ at the beginning of the names. It is always a good idea to change this default value to something else. This will not protect you from all possible hacking attempts, but will create an additional barrier. So replace it with something like:
$table_prefix = 'pz3x_';
After all this editing, you can finally save all changes and close wp-config.php
Use your favorite FTP client and log into your hosting account.
Copy all files from C:\Wordpress to your FTP *folder.
*Note: If you want to install Wordpress on the top-level of the domain, then copy it to your root. If you want to use it as a sub-domain or a folder, for example http://blog.domain.com or http://www.domain.com/blog/, then copy it to the assigned folder.
Final step: After uploading all files (and 3 sub-folders: wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes) from C:\Wordpress to your FTP, open your browser and run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php.
For example, if you are using www.domain.com, try opening www.domain.com/wp-admin/install.php

The result should look something like this:
Set your Blog Title (can be changed later) and your Administrator E-mail (also can be changed later).
Login & password will be sent to this e-mail when installation is finished, so make sure you use your own e-mail account.
Click “Install Wordpress” to finish the installation process.

Common Installation Problems

Even though this process is very simple and takes just a few minutes, there could be some problems during installation, something that doesn’t happen if you’re hosted with great hosting companies.
If you do have some problems, please refer to the Official Wordpress Common_Installation_Problems section, I see no reason in duplicating the information.