Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 1: THE ANATOMY OF A WORDPRESS INSTALL

INSTALLING WORDPRESS IS neither difficult nor time-consuming, and the instructions available on WordPress.org are more than adequate to guide you through the basic install. With the extra knowledge that you’ll get in this chapter, however, you can supercharge your WordPress setup with themes and plugins. WordPress is the bricks and mortar of the site, but themes and plugins are what make it really tick.

Remember that “WordPress” in this book refers to the standalone version of WordPress available for free from http://wordpress.org. Don’t get this mixed up with Automattic’s hosted version on http://wordpress.com. This book is all about the main version available from WordPress.org, with more specifically version 3.8 in mind.

THE BASIC INSTALL

Installing WordPress is a breeze; the PR talk about a “five-minute install” is right on target. In fact, the only reason that the install should take even that long is the fact that uploading the files sometimes takes time due to slow Internet connections or sluggish web hosts. Most likely, you’ll already have a fair amount of experience with basic WordPress installs, so I’ll be brief on this matter.

First, make sure that your system meets the minimum requirements. The most recent set of requirements can be found at http://wordpress.org/about/requirements. If your host supports PHP 5.2.4 or higher and runs MySQL 5.0 or higher, you’ll be fine. However, you should make sure that your host has