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How To Install WordPress – The Right Way

Posted on 03. Jul, 2009 by Andrew in Blogging
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I’ve decided to create a video series to teach you how to install WordPress yourself and do it properly. This is going to be especially useful for anyone who is starting a blog. In the first 3 minutes of the video I’ll explain the main reasons why you would want to do things this way. After that I show you step by step through the entire process. This is something you’ll be able to do yourself in about 5 – 10 minutes.

In this first video I’ll show you how to install WordPress on your local machine as a base for testing everthing from the installation through to customization.

From here we will be able to configure and customize our WordPress blog and not interfere with the live version. This is especially useful if you need to make changes to your theme or just want to test out a new plugin safely. It will also give you all the knowledge you’ll ever need if you ever have an issue like a database corruption or worse.

By the end of the series we will have installed and customized the theme, added all our plugins, imported all the posts and comments, and upload everything to the live server. So sit back and get ready to learn how to take full control of your blog.

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15 Responses to “How To Install WordPress – The Right Way”

  1. haily

    12. Jul, 2009

    nice article, thanks :)

  2. 5 Things You Must Know About WordPress Themes. | Incomes International Blog

    13. Jul, 2009

    [...] No matter if you decide on a free or commercial theme, you need to keep both your objectives and your readers in mind before you go ahead and install your new theme. Choose free themes carefully and test on a local offline server prior to uploading it to your live blog. Watch this video if you don’t know how to setup a local offline version of WordPress. [...]

  3. Rolf

    21. Jul, 2009

    Andrew,

    Thank you very much for making this very instructional video! It was easy to follow.

    I am looking forward to the next. I am helping a friend who is using a web hotel without cpanel and fantastico so I have to install WP there myself – obviously once per domain if understand it correctly.

    I would very much appreciate a lesson on how to make a contact form so people can leave a message and their contact info.

    I will also take a good look at the other things you are doing. Making mowny from blooging would be very cool and 5 000 dollars seems like a dream to me.

    I am looking forward to the next video.

    By the way, I forgot to fill in the catchpa code and your system pointed that out to me and blanked all the information I had already written.

    Well, I don’t mean to be rude but I have to say that I found this very unpleasant.

    Best wishes

  4. Rolf

    23. Jul, 2009

    Hi again Andrew,

    I am just to check the new catchpa and I don’t see it right now.

    Rolf

  5. Andrew

    21. Jul, 2009

    Rolf, glad that you found the video useful. As far as a contact form goes, I use the Contact7 plugin for wordpress. It’s pretty basic but has everything I need. Take a look at my contact page and if that’s what your looking for then that plugin will solve your problems. Don’t forget that there are loads of contact form plugins available. I’ve had a pretty full plate in the past 2 weeks, so I have only made it about 25% through the next video but I hope to get the next installment finished very soon. It’s going to cover basic modifications to a wordpress theme.

    I’m sorry about the problem with the captcha, and I wasn’t aware of that happening. I’ll check the developers site and if it turns out that its the intended behavior then I’ll change over to another captcha plugin. I appreciate you letting me know about this and I’ll get it sorted very soon.

  6. Andrew

    22. Jul, 2009

    I’ve removed the captcha in favor of WP-Captcha Free. I’ll monitor how well it works. If all goes well this will eliminate any future issues.

  7. Rolf

    23. Jul, 2009

    Andrew, Thank you very much for your reply. I really appreciate you taking time to respond!

    Today I installed xampp on my local PC running XP Pro Sp2.

    I had troubles downloading it from the site you suggested. Maybe it is something temporary. I found a newer version. Tried that one and it bombed directly. System restore point was very useful here.

    I found 1.7.1 at http://www.brothersoft.com/xampp-80051.html.

    I am new at blogs and internet but I am an old fox when it comes to computers otherwise.

    I am helping a friend to move to a new hosting account at http://www.unoeuro.com.

    They do not have Cpanel nor Fantastico so I have to do the installation myself.

    I tried following the procedure of xampp as closely as possible but it seems I cannot create a new database. I did not find any way to change that either. Judging from the naming standard it appears to a Linux site. Very strange but unknown territory.

    Cheap hosting but not much of a support so far …:)

    Since you recommend setting things up locally first i take it that you then – when ready – would just upload the whole thing to the hosting service – at http://www.unoeuro.com in my case?

    I guess so and I am going to give it a try when I have rested a while. I find the FireFTP addon for Firefox quite useful and fast as well so why not?

    Right now it would be quite ok with very basic blogs just to get something up there quickly and then improve it step by step.

    I am looking forward to the next video and thanks again for this one! Please let me know if there is anything you think I could help you with. Right now I have time on my hands at least – unemployed and old …:)

    I will check the catchpa as well.

    Best wishes

  8. Andrew

    23. Jul, 2009

    Unusual that xampp failed on installation. It’s pretty heavily tested and is generally stable. Glad you got it sorted out pretty quickly. You are correct in your thinking, I setup everything first locally, that includes testing the theme, making any changes, installing all the plugins and testing those as well. Once it’s stable I upload the whole thing. Doing it that way does require a certain amount of technical ability. It’s faster, but more can go wrong. A slower but less technical way of uploading once testing is complete, upload all your custom theme and plugin files. Then manually setup the live server. As soon as I am able I will get a video done on how to do both methods.

    To manage the database on your local machine using xampp, you just go to the control panel and click manage which opens a browser with phpmyadmin. You can add the database there.

    To find out what type of server you have at unoeuro.com ssh into the machine and type ‘uname -a’ at the prompt. This will tell you the OS type, version and kernel version. You should also check to see if the machine came with phpmyadmin installed on it. If so then log in and follow the procedure as it was done with xampp. If not then you can easily install it but setup is a little tricky in terms of security. If you have a few years of experience then you should be able to easily understand the documentation and get it installed correctly. Obviously you will need MySQL already installed before you install phpmyadmin but there is plenty of how-to’s at mysql’s website.

    Hope this gets you on the right track and let me know if you have any more questions. I’m really busy at the moment but I’ll do my best to get more videos out very soon.

  9. Andrew

    23. Jul, 2009

    That’s right I’m using a capture-free solution now. Saves everyone from future problems.

  10. Rolf

    24. Jul, 2009

    Hi Andrew,

    Thanks again for your generosity! I feel a bit like a parasite …

    I finally got it when the Unoeuro sent me a message.

    To my defense I can say that I at least was looking in the right direction.

    I had WP in the folder wordpress located in the public_html folder.

    I could not get it to start until I was instructed to go to http://www.mydomain.com/wordpress!

    I had tried a lot of variations of which none worked.

    How could I have realized that this was the correct path?

    It could be a stumbling block for any newbie I think.

    Now I am trying to get WP to speak Danish with a manual install.

    I have created the folder “langauges” in wp-content and I have downloaded the da-DK.mo file.

    I have edited the wp-config.php correspondingly.

    But no! I can’t see much Danish there other than what I wrote myself.

    Sigh!

    Do I have to install the Danish version from scratch?

    I thought this was the way. – I also saw from the Codex docs that there are multilingual solutions available through plugins. Very nice but right now it would be enough with Danish …:)

    I suppose there is a plugin to backup a whole installation and put it in a safe place?

    Good luck with the upcoming videos! I look forward to them!

    Best wishes

  11. Andrew

    24. Jul, 2009

    @Rolf, threaded comments only go 5 levels but this is in response to your most recent questions.

    Yes that’s an area that I haven’t covered yet. If you want wordpress as your default website you need to have all the files in the root directory. There is a method to have it all located in a subdirectory with just index.php in the root but the first video was not designed to cover that yet. It’s a little more of an advanced topic.

    Have a read of this post about localizing your blog. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

  12. Rolf

    24. Jul, 2009

    Andrew,

    Thanks again for taking time to reply – I really appreciate it!

    I checked the link to the language issues and realized that it was a bigger issue than I thought. Just getting the date format correct is an issue by itself …

    This is getting on my pride I think …:)

    There is a Danish version of WP and I think I will start over from scratch and install that in the root directory in OurMainDomain.dk at UnoEuro.

    However, we have some 10 domains more which we want to transfer to Uno ehre they become attached to OurMainDomain.dk – let’s call one OurSecondDomain.dk.

    We want to use WP as the only tool as long as possible.

    of course we want to end up at the blog of OurSecondDomain when we type http://www.OurSecondDomain.dk and so on.

    So I need to find out how to achieve this and of course I cannot expect you to solve this problem for me but perhaps it can serve as input for your coming videos.

    The language issue is very intriguing and I will investigate this for my own personal sites but I do need some more time to investigate that I think. Good that it is possible anyway even though there seems to be some headache involved.

    For now I am going to concentrate to get a Danish version up and running.

    Wish me luck, please!

    Thanks a lot for your help!

    Best wishes

    Right now we don’t need all the possible interactivity of blogs so I am going to take away some functions. Caroline Middlebrook has a no cost course on how to build static sites using WP.

    I think she has some real good videos on this subject so take a look here: http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/niche-sites-wp/

  13. Andrew

    25. Jul, 2009

    I agree you should get your localization working first. There are a number of plugins available that will auto translate for multiple languages but I’ve not used them. As far as the domains go, from your explanation it sounds as though your trying to use the same instance of wordpress and the database. On your host you should be setting up virtual name based servers. That’s far beyond the scope of this blog, but there are literally hundreds of good how-to’s about that. Next once you have your virtual servers setup you install an instance of wordpress using the same techniques you learned in the video, but with one ‘big’ difference. You need to create a new database for each virtual server. So for ourfirstdomain.dk – use database ‘wp-domain-one’ and for the ourseconddomain.dk – use database ‘wp-domain-two’ and so on.

  14. Rolf

    28. Jul, 2009

    I agree that all this suddenly moved from basic to advanced …

    I have found some good info on multilangauage issues so I know I will get it to work some day. The Wordpress platform itself is in fact such an implementation.

    I think I understand what you mean by virtual servers.

    I am happy to say that I have at least got things going in Danish and that is good enough for now.

    I just have to learn to take things off from the side bar such as “development blog”, “documentation” etc. They are not needed for now.

    I am still confused but at a much higher level …:)

    Thanks a lot!

  15. Andrew

    28. Jul, 2009

    Confusion at a higher level means you’re learning so that’s a good thing.

    By virtual server I mean that not a physical server but a server that hosts many individual sites. Each site is a virtual site. Virtual servers are essentially the same thing from a server perspective ie: 1 physical piece of hardware with many servers that appear to be individual pieces of hardware but in fact are part of a single machine.

    I’m a little behind in my work at the moment but in the next video I’ll be looking at how to make the kinds of changes to the default WordPress installation such as what you want to do.

    In the mean time just take a look at the Settings page and the Links page where you can disable those links from the blogroll.