David’s Technical Musings

In the previous two parts I shared my experiences with installing the components required before installing WordPress.  We’re finally ready to proceed with the main event.

WordPress is like phpMyAdmin in that it is simply a bunch of files that need to be copied to your web server and then some configuration steps.  In this case, though, the WordPress folks have done an amazing job at making it simple.  Here is what must be done.

Copy files to your web server

This is pretty straight-forward.  You can either copy them to the root of your web server or to a subdirectory.  I started by copying them to a WordPressTest subdirectory just to see how things worked.  Since then I’ve created a hierarchy of WordPress sites.  I’ll talk more about how I made that happen.

Create a database for your site

Here is where phpMyAdmin can be used.  I said at the end of my last installment that I may not have needed to use phpMyAdmin.  It turns out that the installation instructions for WordPress include instructions for using SQL statements to prepare the WordPress database.  This is, in fact, what I ended up doing to start with while I was working out the kinks with phpMyAdmin.  There are four commands that must be executed:

In the above statements, replace <dbname> with the name of your WordPress database, replace <wpuser> with the name of a user to be used by the WordPress web site, and replace <password> with the password for the user.  You will need all of these in another step.

The first statement is pretty self explanatory.  It simply creates the database.

The second statement isn’t strictly necessary.  I discovered an oddity with the default collation used by MySQL - it uses latin1_swedish_ci.  Swedish?  Okay, probably because the company that made it is from Swedish.  I looked all over for a way to change the default but couldn’t find one.  This command takes care of it for me.

The third statement creates an account (if it doesn’t already exist) and gives it all the privileges it needs to manage the WordPress database.

The fourth statement makes sure the privileges are written to the mysql (system) database.

Edit the wp-config.php file

There are really only three lines in the wp-config.php file that need to be modified, but you might choose to modify others:

1. DB_NAME - the name of the database you created above.
2. DB_USER - the name of the user you created and gave permission to above.
3. DB_PASSWORD - the password for the user.
4. $table_prefix - the prefix for all tables for this web site.  The default file sets this to wp_.  If you want to use a single database for more than one site you might want to modify this.
5. WPLANG - you should probably set this to your language, although I don’t know how it will behave for languages other than en_US (which is what I set it to).  There is a comment in the file saying there must be an associated .mo file, but I didn’t need one for en_US.  This is required by some plug-ins and themes.

Fire up the browser

It’s time to navigate to your web site.  You will be presented with a page saying the web site hasn’t been configured and asking if you want to do that now.  Configuration is painless, completely painless.  You enter three pieces of information:

1. Name of the blog.
2. Email address for the blog.
3. Whether you want the site published or not.  I haven’t investigated this feature yet, so I’m not sure yet what it actually does.

After entering this info, WordPress creates the necessary tables and then presents you with a page containing a password and a link to log on with.  You’ll want to do so right away (using the admin account) and then change the password.

Done!

That’s it.  You have a functioning blog web site.  There are a number of options I change on all my sites, but you don’t need to do anything to be able to start blogging away.

Final words

Now that I finally have everything up and running and I’ve spent almost a week on this stuff, I have some observations:

1. The difficulty of getting everything right speaks to the incredible value of companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and others who build complete solutions and actually sell them.  They actually have a vested interest in pulling together all the loose ends to provide their customers with a solution that works.  Could you imagine your grandmother (or some non-technical family member or friend) going through what I described in my last two posts?  I can’t either.  That’s not to say that these companies get everything right.  They don’t  But they do offer significant value to those who are willing to pay for it.
2. The fact that everything I’ve needed is available for free on the Internet with documentation and community support allows people who have enough knowledge and capability to make it work.  I try to avoid complaining about companies, particularly my former employer (no one likes to be around a whiner), but I do have pet peeves.  One of them is the quality of the documentation and support available from Microsoft.  Maybe I’ll write about that in more detail, but not now.  I’m just stunned at how much information is available online about these products.  I have been able to solve every single one of the problems I encountered so far due to what is made available by people who don’t get paid for it.  Wow!
3. The fact that these components are available for free for those who can make it work has got to have had a significant impact on the spread of information and technology.  I’m just amazed at the overall quality and what can be done with it.