WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 3. Installing WordPress

The WordPress website talks about its famous five-minute install. It's no idle boast — everything in this lesson can be done in five minutes, but it took me a few WordPress sites to get it down to that time. If it's your first install, and you're handy with an FTP program, familiar with database installs using a hosting panel like Parallels/Plesk or cPanel, and at ease with editing files in a text editor, I would count on about 10 to 15 minutes. If you're relying completely on this lesson to lead you through the steps, it could be 30 minutes or more.

What the five-minute install really refers to is the fact that once you have files in place and a database created, clicking the Install button has you up and running in less than five minutes. This lesson is mostly about what comes before clicking the Install button.

Because this book covers the self-hosted version of WordPress, I'm assuming that you have a hosting account on a web server. This is different from having a domain name. Domain names point to servers where the files for a website are stored and having a place to put your web site files is what I mean by a hosting account.

Note

Some hosts offer auto-installation of WordPress, so check for that, but be sure they're using the latest version.

There are very few requirements for WordPress, and most hosting packages these days — even the most basic — should meet them. Still it's best to double-check the host you're planning to use or your existing ...