Table of contents for Installing WordPress On IIS From the Ground Up

  1. Installing MySQL on Windows
  2. Installing FastCGI on IIS6
  3. Installing PHP on Windows and IIS
  4. Installing phpMyAdmin on Windows and IIS 6.0
  5. Preparing to Install WordPress on Windows and IIS
  6. Installing WordPress (Single-User)
  7. Troubleshooting on IIS7


This article will show the exact steps for setting up a single-user WordPress blog.

Dependencies

Before you can perform the steps in this article, make sure that you’ve performed the steps in the following articles:

If you’ve performed these steps, you are ready to install WordPress.

Configure WordPress

Before we can create the WordPress site, we have to create a configuration script which will tell it where to find the database for storing content, how to access it, and other settings.

  1. Load the wp-config-sample.php file found in the root of the WordPress files you copied earlier in a text editor.
     wp-sample-config.php Loaded
  2. Set the name of the database the site is to use and the user and password for accessing it that you specified earlier when creating the database.
     wp-sample-config.php Setting DB, User, Password
  3. You need to specify several unique keys for proper authentication.  Scroll down to the Authentication Unique Keys section.
     wp-sample-config.php Authentication Unique Keys
  4. You’ll notice in that section that there is a URL for generating those keys - https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/.   Navigating to that location in an Internet browser will automatically generate the keys.  If you don’t like the keys, refresh the page to generate new ones.
     Generate Authentication Unique Keys
  5. Copy the lines from that page and replace the lines in the WordPress configuration file (lines 44 through 47 in the above image).
  6. If you plan to store the content for multiple WordPress sites in the same database, you will want to change the table prefix for each one.  The default value is wp_, which works great for most sites.  Scroll down to the WordPress Database Table prefix section in the file.  Change the prefix to a value that makes sense for the new site, if necessary.
     wp-sample-config.php Table Prefix
  7. Some WordPress plugins don’t work properly if WPLANG is not set to a valid non-empty value.  Scroll down to the WordPress Localized Language section and set the value to en for English.
     wp-sample-config.php Language
  8. Save the file in the same directory as wp-config.php.

Create WordPress Blog

Now it’s time to actually create the web site.

  1. Navigate to the URL for your site.  You should see the WordPress welcome page for installing the blog.
    WP Install
  2. Type the name you want to give to your blog in the Blog Title box.  This could be something as simple as Joe’s Blog or it could be the name of your business.
  3. Type your email address.  This is used as the email address for the admin account.
  4. If your site is an internal blog, e.g. for your company or is a test blog, uncheck the Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.  Otherwise leave it checked.
  5. Click the Install WordPress button.  You should be presented with a Success page that gives you a username and a password for logging in to the site.  Note that this password is randomly generated and will be different each time you set up a WordPress site.  Select the password with your mouse and copy it to your clipboard.  Then click on the Log In button.Note that if you lose this password, you will have to delete the tables that were created and start over.
    WP Install Success
  6. Notice that the name you specified for the title of your blog is displayed at the top of the login page.  Enter admin for the username and paste the password you copied to the clipboard into the password box.  You’re going to change the password right away, so don’t check the Remember Me checkbox.  Now click the Log In button.
    WP First Login
  7. You are now presented with the dashboard for your blog.  This page gives you an overview of posts, pages, comments, etc. that are part of your WordPress web site.  You’ll notice at the top right of the page is a greeting - Howdy, admin.  Isn’t that nice?  WordPress does not allow you to change usernames, so if you want to use a different username for logging in to your site, you’ll want to create a new user and make it an admin.  To do that, click on the Users link on the left and then click on the Add New link underneath it.You could also simply use the admin account.  If you want to do that, click on the word admin in the upper right so that you can change the options for your profile, most importantly the password.
    WP Dashboard
  8. The Profile page allows you to modify the options for the user, including first and last name, contact info, and, most importantly, the password.
    WP User Profile Top
    Scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter a new password in both boxes.  Then click the Update Profile button.
     WP User Profile Password

Your WordPress web site is now set up and ready to receive visitors.  Take some time to explore the dashboard and the other parts of the admin panel.  The next parts of this series will discuss various WordPress plugins to consider for your site.

Resources

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