The Famous 5-Minute WordPress Installation

Recently I discussed easily installing WordPress with Fantastico. Fantastico makes it really easy to install WordPress, especially if you have little or no technical knowledge. However, depending on your host, you may not have access to Fantastico or may prefer to install WordPress using a different method. If so, let me introduce you to the famous 5-minute WordPress installation.

Like most programs, you’re going to begin by doing the simple download and unzip. That’s the first and easiest step. When unzipping it, you’ll want to save it somewhere easy for you to find.

After unzipping WordPress, you’ll want to open the WordPress folder and navigate to the file named wp-config-sample.php. You’ll now take out “sample” from the name and just have it say wp-config.php.

Either before or after renaming the wp-config.php file, you’ll create a database on your WordPress server. While doing this, go ahead and create a user with permissions for the database.

The next step may seem a little more difficult, but really isn’t. Remember the WordPress file you renamed? Well now you’ll be editing some of the details in that file. Sounds a little more difficult, but just means filling in details about your database. You’ll need the following information by your side: the database name, username, password and host. You should have received all this information after creating the WordPress database and user.

Once you have these things, you’ll open the wp-config.php file in a text editor, but not Microsoft Word. In the text editor, you’ll see the following items: ‘putyourdbnamehere’, ‘usernamehere’, ‘yourpasswordhere’ and ‘localhost’. Of course like they imply, you’ll be putting your database name, user name and password in replace of those spots. The part that says ‘localhost’ should stay the same, but in the case that it doesn’t, then you’ll need to contact your host.

You’re almost done. You’ll now upload the WordPress files into the root directory of your domain. For example, you’ll be uploading it into ftp://www.yourwebsite.com.

Lastly, just type http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/install.php into your web browser to complete the installation. WordPress will ask you a few questions about your blog — name, admin email, etc — and pretty soon you’re done. 

WordPress’s Famous 5-Minute Install is famously simple for folks that know how to navigate around to create databases and such. But if you want the simplest WordPress installation of all… tune in next week for Installing WordPress with Simple Scripts.