WordPress Installation on Windows PC

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Are you facing problems in setting up a WordPress blog site in your remote hosting space? If so, here is the step-by-step guidance to set up a demo site in your home PC prior to host it in a remote server. If you own a private domain for publishing your blogs is a true professional approach and a blogger can always get advantages from experimenting and customizing new templates, plugins etc. I always prefer such a working model of a server at my premises in order to test new theme templates and widgets in my own way. Hosting environment may differ for different blogging sites as well as other websites, can be with Linux or with Windows server, but the process for setting up a site is more or less the same.

In my case, I faced several issues while setting up wordpress blog in my web server. After setting up the site, experimenting with plentyful themes and plugins were not much easy. The main disadvantage is that internet connection has to be kept up throughout the testing time. Therefore I decided to setup the same environment in my PC so that testing a plugin or theme can be done well before uploading those into the webserver. I am happy to share my experiences in simple words so that you may get the same experience without much problems. If you are using Wndows XP or Vista it will be easier for me to explain the whole story. You need to download the latest versions of WampServer and wordpress before starting the steps. WampServer is a wndows based software bundled with Apache, MySQL and PHP. If you install this you need not install and configure Apache, MySQL and PHP separately. Installtion of WampServer files generally takes place at C:\wamp folder. Let it be like that. WordPress software is available as in zip format and it has to be kept uncompressed and copied to C:\wamp\www\wordpress folder.

My blog site is hosted by a Linux server with Apache-MySQL-PHP, but the testing part was carried out in my home PC running under Windows XP. I found Installing and testing WordPress in a local machine is fairly a simple task and at the same time it offers flexibility and convenience to test and modify new themes and plugins available from many promotional sites. It is highly suitable to you if you are planning to setup a WampServer model. Here are the steps to setup the server environment,

Download WampServer (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and install it to your PC. By default it installs to C:\wamp directory.

Run WampServer. It activates MySQL, Apache and PHP. See WAMPSERVER icon from the systems tray. From the tray, run phpMyAdmin. A screen appears in your web browser as given below. From the screen click phpMyAdmin.

Create a new database. Write database name as wordpress. Leave rest of the entries as it is (here the default user id is ‘root’ with a blank password). Check the previleges by clicking previleges option. If those are not selected, give ticks on all check boxes (by default your database gets global previleges, so there may not be any problem).

phpMyAdmin -Database creation

phpMyAdmin -Database previleges

Download latest version of WordPress. Unzip the file to c:\wamp\www folder. (Now WordPress files are copied into C:\wamp\www\wordpress folder).

Open wp-config-sample.php located at C:\wamp\www\wordpress folder using notepad or any suitable editor.

You can see default entries as given below,

wp-config-sample.php

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Change the entries of DB_NAME, DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD and save it as wp-config.php

wp-config.php

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Open your internet browser. Type the URL http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php. You can see a page similar to this (screen may vary depends on your wordpress version)
Create your Blog title and enter your e-mail id and press the ‘Install WordPress’ button. You get a user name as admin and a password. Note down the password. Your wordpress admin site is ready now.