Installing a WordPress blog
3 August 2006, by Chris
I'll be setting up WordPress and then integrating existing XHTML and CSS into a WordPress theme. 
So, the existence of this blog indicates that I’ve been reasonably successful in setting up a WordPress blog for the first time. I’ve heard a lot about the system before, but this is the first time I’ve got my hands dirty with WordPress.
We’ve already got a site set-up (exponetic.com) so I won’t be concerning myself with design, or building the CSS and XHTML with this post. I’ll simply be setting up WordPress and then integrating the existing XHTML and CSS into a WordPress theme. I’ll write up the theme creation when I get a minute.
The WordPress site and general operation seems good (what you would expect from a modern open source effort), although I’m not totally convinced by the design and it’s often inordinately large font, but so be it. I guess it’s meant to be good for usability.
The download and install seemed to me very simple. They boast a ‘famous five minute install’ which (as long as you’re confident on the Linux command line) is reasonably true.
I’m using a Debian server. I log in as the www-data user (so everything is owned by the right user when I set things up) and then cd to make sure I’m in my home directory, which should be /var/www. As the site is already set up, I’m going to make a blog/ directory to house the blog. After navigating to the htdocs site directory, I make the directory mkdir blog and then cd blog into it.
So now I need to download WordPress.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
You should see the file download.
Then unzip it. tar -xvvzf latest.tar.gz
Then set up your database and finish the install. All this is covered on the official WordPress web site.
Next, I’ll look at the re-skinning process, but that will have to wait for another post.
August 3, 2006 at 10:14 am
Filed in: Design, Front-end, PHP, MySQL, Open Source
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