WordPress® Bible

Chapter 2. Installing and Configuring WordPress

IN THIS CHAPTER

• System requirements

• Choosing a Web server

• Installing WordPress

WordPress is one of the simplest open source blog platforms to install. It has long bragged about its famous "five-minute install." In fact, installing WordPress can take much less than five minutes. The most time-consuming part is the creation of a database for WordPress to use. This process can be near instantaneous if you're a power user who can script the database creation, or a minute or two if a Web host control panel login is required.

Most Web servers are already set up out of the box to handle WordPress. If you have PHP 4.3 or better and MySQL 4.1.2 or better, then you are set to go. You can skip ahead to the part of this chapter that deals directly with handling the installation of WordPress.

If you are starting from scratch with your own server that doesn't have the required PHP scripting language and MySQL database build, or if you have to install the Apache or other Web server, then read on.

Tip

At this time, the most stable version of PHP is PHP 5.3.1. MySQL is stable at MySQL 5.1.36.

Note

PHP 4 reached its end of life on August 8, 2008, and is no longer supported by the PHP project. Quality hosts will not support it and though some still have it installed, I recommend avoiding hosts who do.

System Requirements

The developers of WordPress have gone to great lengths to make WordPress compatible with as many platforms as it can. To that end, it can run on ...