+ Amal's Blog +: Experimental Development : Setting a Database & Installing Wordpress

Through out my research.. I found that most of the new e-portfolios are a blogs or dynamic websites that let the user update his entries easily ..
I decided to use wordpress as my blogging platform ..
Why Wordpress is now my Blog of Choice

Why Wordpress?

- WordPress is free & well known for its ease of installation.
- WordPress has a focus on usability and user-testing which many open source projects lack.
- It has a simple content management system, that allows the user to edit and create posts.
- Installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete.
- Many web hosts now offer tools (e.g. Fantastico) to automatically install WordPress for you. However, I like to install WordPress myself..

Firstly, I have to interact with the database that I'm going to create, e.g. edit a configuration file, use an FTP client to upload the software, and then run through its quick online install process, before modifying WordPress to suit my needs.

1. Setting up a Database:

my web hosting accounts allow me to use cPanel, an easy to use interface that allows to quickly get to the important control areas of my website.

It allows me to easily add a database as well as a user for the database so that WordPress can run properly.

The steps you need to take in cPanel is to click on mySQL Databases icon,

and then adding a new database, adding a new user, and making sure the user to the database has a full permission to add and remove records.

WordPress stores all its information, and my blog posts in the database, and so it has to be able to connect to the database with full permissions.

2. Uploading/Installing Wordpress & Editing the Config File:

I downloaded the latest version of Wordpress from (http://www.wordpress.org)
To tell WordPress which database to use when uploading it, I edited a file that comes with WordPress ( wp-config-sample.php). There's alot of ducomentation in the Wprdpress website that explain in details how to install Wordpress.
I renamed this to wp-config.php and changed a few lines. They have commented the code really nicely, so understanding what to change is relatively easy.

The things in red/lowercase are the ones I can change. For the first three items, I will input the information I used when creating my database. The last item, asks you what you want the tables in the database to be prefixed with. This allows me to install more than one WordPress blog in one database. I can keep it as its default.

Next,I uploaded the files to where I want to install WordPress. I created a sub-directory, a folder named “wordpress”.

For uploading my files, I use FileZilla.I input my details and connected to my directory. I then draged and droped all the files and folders and uploaded them to my hosting account.