The team behind WordPress boasts to have a simple five minute installation process, by which I guess they mean it takes 5 minutes alone to read and understand the instructions, never mind executing all the downloading and configuration steps…
Fortunately, there’s a way for the time from nada to a WordPress blog to be under a minute: just make sure you choose one of the many web host providers that offer accounts with a Fantastico script for WordPress. Fantastico is a set of automatic installation scripts for popular open source implementations of wikis, blogs, photo galleries, etc. Using Fantastico is trivial.
First you log into cPanel, the tool that allows you to configure your account from your web browser. When you created your account on the hosting provider you received a username, password and the URL for accessing cPanel.
Second, you scroll down in the main cPanel page until you see a smiley icon with the label Fantastico. Click on it and you will see a list of applications you can install. Click on WordPress and then just follow the instructions. Basically, you just have to fill out some text boxes saying
- in which domain and folder you want to install the software (e.g. http://yoursubdomain.yourprovider.com/yourblogsname),
- what will be the username and password of the blog’s administrator (that’s you),
- to what e-mail you want notifications (e.g. of new comments) to be sent,
- what is the blog’s name and description (also known as the tagline).
Since the folder will be part of the blog’s URL, it’s best to be related to the blog’s name. In the case of this blog, I gave the following information:
- domain: http://michel.wermelinger.ws (which I had bought before, but that’s another story…)
- folder: chezmichel
- admin’s username and password and notification e-mail: you wish!
- blog’s name: chez michel
- blog’s description: a self-explanatory site
And that’s it! After a few seconds, Fantastico will say it has created the blog and you can access it at the URL given by your domain+folder. So I did. I opened http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel in my browser and… there it was: my shiny new blog! Its minimalistic and blueish look isn’t very exciting, but at least it’s clean and clear (i.e. readable). Moreover, there’s a default example post, appropriately called ‘Hello World!’, there’s a link underneath it leading to an example comment, and there are some links on the right sidebar, the first one leading to an example page about the blog, and the rest mostly leading to WordPress-related websites.
This is great: installation was a walk in the park!
(pause, contemplating the new blog)
Er… now what? How do I edit the blog?
[...] WordPress 2.7 using Fantastico, in the way described previously in this blog. Created a new blog with the same name and administrator username and password as the [...]