Installing Wordpress may be easy for most of you, but since this is a blogging course, I believe it is a necessary post to include in order to make sure nobody is left out because they lack some technical skills.

Now…

To install Wordpress there are several things you need:

1. FTP Access
2. SQL Database
3. Wordpress

FTP Access: FTP users are usually given when you first opened up your hosting account, but if you’re still confused, here’s some guides to help you create an FTP account.

cPanel Users – http://www.cpanel.net/support/docs/11/cpanel/files_create.html

Dreamhost Users – http://wiki.dreamhost.com/FTP

GoDaddy Users - http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=1235&topic_id=80

SQL Database

Creating and SQL Database is relatively simple. I will use cPanel as an example on how to do it.

1. Click on the MySQL Databases link or icon which will take you to a new page.
2. Here, create a new database, a new user, then match that user to the database.

Wordpress

This is the actual installation process.

1. Download Wordpress from http://wordpress.org
2. Unzip the archive.
3. Edit the config file. It is usually named wp-config.php or wp-config-sample.php If it’s something else other than wp-config.php, you’ll need to rename it to that. Open this file up with Notepad, or another text editor and find these lines and change them to match the SQL information you created:
   define('DB_NAME', 'dbname‘); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘dbusername‘); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘dbpassword‘); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
4. After changing the values to match your SQL information you created earlier, save the file.
5. Login into your FTP account either through an FTP client (such as SmartFTP) or if you’re using Internet Explorer, go to the FTP server your host has provided you with for example ftp://domainname.com
6. Upload your Wordpress extracted files.
7. Now visit http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/install.php to start the installation process.

If this post is still confusing and you cannot install Wordpress, visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress. They offer quite a few great articles on installing and getting to know Wordpress. I really recommend everyone that is not familiar with Wordpress, to read these articles, play around with Wordpress this weekend, make some posts, write some pages, create a few comments, and get the feel of what it’s like to use a blog.

For the rest of you, enjoy your weekend and we’ll get down to serious blogging business next week!

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