Installing Wordpress

Using the Ubuntu LAMP desktop installation that we've previously configured, lets go ahead and install one of the most popular blogging packages on the web, Wordpress. I use wordpress when all I need is a quick and easy blog configuration. While CMS's like Drupal and Joomla are great for building mutlifunctional sites, they sometimes can be overkill for someone who just wants a simple blog site. This is where Wordpress shines.

Lets get started. To install Wordpress you will need to navigate to your /var/www folder on your local machine. Lets go ahead and download the package from the wordpress site. Head over to the wordpress download page and find the path to the direct download to wordpress. I do this by right clicking and save target path. Then I paste it into my wget command like this

sudo wget (past the path here)

That should download the latest.tar.gz file to your web root directory. Now go ahead and untar the file.

sudo tar xfvz latest.tar.gz

This will create a directory called wordpress and put all the files you need into that directory. To verify, do

cd wordpress

ls

You should see something like this

index.php           wp-comments-post.php  wp-links-opml.php  wp-rss.php
license.txt         wp-commentsrss2.php   wp-login.php       wp-settings.php
readme.html         wp-config-sample.php  wp-mail.php        wp-trackback.php
wp-admin            wp-content            wp-pass.php        xmlrpc.php
wp-app.php          wp-cron.php           wp-rdf.php
wp-atom.php         wp-feed.php           wp-register.php
wp-blog-header.php  wp-includes           wp-rss2.php

Go ahead and chmod this directory 777 so we can create our config file. We will change the permissions back later.

 sudo chmod 777 /var/www/wordpress

Before we do anyting else, lets create a new user in MySQL for this installation. This time round, I'm going to do it command line style, but keep in mind you can do this with phpmyadmin as well. Refer back to the drupal installation tutorial on how to do this.  Lets go ahead and log into MySQL

 sudo mysql -u root -p

This logs us into mysql using the root user(-u) and prompts for a password (-p). Then do the following at the mysql> prompt

create database wordpress;

grant all on wordpress.* to 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'createapassword';

quit

This is saying, hey mysql, grant all privileges, like maitainaining the database, creating new tables, on the database wordpress to the user wordpress@localhost (which it creates if there is not one, and give it the password or authenticate with the password 'whatyouputforapassword'.

Now, you could have gone in phpmyadmin and done this with a graphical user interface, but sometimes this is faster, or perhaps you prefer the command line. Now you can do it baby!

So now its time to install that sucka. We've got our files in place, and our empty database created. Lets head over to http://localhost/wordpress and check it out! You should see something like this.

Go ahead and click on "create a wp-config.php file through a web interface". If you get an error about write access, make sure you executed the chmod command above, and that will fix the issue. Also keep in mind you can manually create this file yourself on the command line by going in and copying the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and then modifying the fields. I will go through the web interface because I believe that most people will opt for this.

You should now see

Just like it says, let's go by clicking on let's go! You now see the page where you need to enter the database information that we created above on the command line. If you used the username and database name that I did, you should be entering wordpress wordpress and your password. See below.

When you hit submit, providing your information is correct, you should see a very happy message like this.

Go ahead and click on "run the install!" and you should see your final step, which is naming your blog and providing your email address.

Congrats! You will be provided with a username and password by the installer which will give you access to the admin pages. Make sure to change your password to something you will remember. Wordpress has lots of great features so play around and try it out! Also, if you run in to trouble, there is lots of documentation over at wordpress.org. You can also email me or head over to the forums so that everyone has a chance to help.