Third time lucky how I conquered WordPress

You can never guess how many times I tried to learn WordPress. For a beginner, it seems a daunting process. First two times I made several mistakes but the third time I got lucky and that’s how I conquered wordpress. Today, in this article, I will take you to the roadmap of learning wordpress and it’s core concepts.

Introduction

As you know, WordPress is a CMS. It helps you in setting up and running the websites quickly and without the need of any technical knowledge. You can create any kind of website like portfolio, resume, technical blogs, ecommerce, business website, social networks etc. You can also integrate payment system in it and start your online shop.

It gets complex to understand the dashboard since it handles so many tasks. In two attempts I failed to install it. Third time lucky it got installed and I survived to tell the tale of how I conquered WordPress.

Important Steps

1. Decide whether you want to install on your local machine or on a server.
2. If on server then you should have a domain address (website name).
3. If on your pc then you need to setup a server like xampp.
4. Download the compressed wordpress bundle from wordpress.org and extract it in server directory. This directory is different for different types of servers. We will look at it in the article.
5. Open your website in browser. It will open a setup page. Fill the information there.
6. Create a MySql database user. You will need this user information in setup page.
7. The setup will complete here.
8. Open the wordpress admin dashboard at folder /wp-admin/

If you complete all these steps carefully, you will be lucky first time only in conquering the wordpress.

Setting Local Machine

Let’s setup on our local machine. First, we need Xampp. It’s a bundle of software which are required to run a server. These software are – Apache, MariaDB, Php, and Perl. To run WordPress, we require these software.

You can download xampp from here – https://www.apachefriends.org/

After downloading, install it in your OS.

After installation, you will find a new directory call xampp in your filesystem. On windows (by default) it is at location C:\\xampp.

You can see from image that there are a number of directories inside xampp folder. All these directories correspond to either storing different files or software like php, perl, mysql, phpmyadmin etc.

For us, the most important directory is htdocs. Anything inside this directory will get published as our website. So, when we open our domain in browser (localhost in this case), it will show the content of htdocs. Now you know where to put the files of wordpress.

Before downloading wordpress, we need to do one more thing. Currently our server is not running. For that you need to run xampp-control which is available in xampp directory –

After running xampp-control, it will look like as shown in the below image. Make sure that both Apache and Mysql must be running. Keep the panel open.

Creating Database User

For wordpress we need to create a database and a user. Both xampp and wordpress uses Mariadb (Mysql). Since xampp provided us phpmyadmin, we can use it for all the db related stuff.

Open localhost/phpmyadmin in your browser. It will look like this –

Click on Databases tab. Here we will create a new database. Write the name as my_wordpress_site and click create button.

your new database is created. Now we need to create a new user and connect it with our database. So click on Privileges tab –

in this tab, you will find Add user account option. It’s shown in the above image too. Click on it and fill the appropriate information. Please don’t use the same password as I am using in my configuration. Grant permission on this user as shown in the below image –

I have used these details –

Username: wordpress_admin
Host name: localhost
Password: thisisadminpassword

Also make sure that Grant all privileges on database is checked. Afterwards click on Go button at the very bottom of the page.

Now our database is created, user is created and both database and user are connected.

Setting WordPress

Our next step is to setup wordpress. First we need to download it. You may get the latest version from here – WordPress tar.gz

Go to your htdocs folder and delete all the content from it. There will be around 10-12 files and directories –

Now extract the content of wordpress gzip file into htdocs. It will look like in the below image. If you are facing issues extracting gzip file, you can use 7zip.

Note: When you extract the .tar.gz file it will first get extracted to .tar file. You need to extract this .tar file again. Then it will show you a single directory with name wordpress. You need to move all the content of this directory to htdocs directory. So, wordpress directory will be empty and htdocs has the content as shown in the above image.

We are all set to configure wordpress website.

Open localhost in your browser and you will be presented the language selection screen –

Choose your website language and click continue. You will get another page where wordpress ask you to keep the database details handy. Click on let's go button.

Fill up database information and click submit button –

After it, wordpress will try to communicate with database. If it is successful then it will show the next screen where you can fill a little details about your new website and login credentials. These credentials are not of database. It is for logging into wordpress dashboard. So you are going to use this username and password all the time. Keep them safe.

Now click on Install WordPress and it’s done.

That’s how I configured wordpress.

Accessing WordPress Dashboard

In the above image you can see that wordpress already gave us the Log In button. You can use this button or go to this address – http://localhost/wp-admin/

Enter your credentials. For me they are –

username: admin
password: P3Yv)ay4z@ZR&WR(uZ

Click on log in and you will get the dashboard –

This is the admin dashboard. You can create posts, pages, comments, change themes, add plugins, add users etc. This is a complete CMS.

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Conclusion

You saw how easily we conquered the wordpress and we didn’t need three times to get lucky. If you follow the steps correctly you will be able to successfully run wordpress on your local system. In order to run it on server, you need a web hosting with php and mysql and connect it with a domain name. Then simply extract wordpress .tar.gz file into server public_html directory. Open the domain in browser and complete setup.