The famous WordPress 5-minute installation revisited, aka Grandma’s no-fail WP Multiple Blog Installation Tutorial
(best experienced with an account on pair.com and an Apple computer running Mac OS X)
OK, so you’ve heard of how wonderful it is to have a blog, and now you want to install WordPress. I know how it feels. I’ve had exactly the same thought several times in the past - at least three times, I’d say, starting with WP version 1.2-mingus or thereabouts.
On the surface, WordPress sounded very easy and very convincing right from the beginning - but I must be a real dodo, because I had to go through the constantly growing online documentation, the Codex, the forums, the linked tutorials, more tutorials I came across by accident, etc., many many times before things started to click and make some real sense for me. I guess there was just too much for my old head to get round it quickly - so for a couple of times at least, I got where I thought I was really close to having my blogs going… but had instead to surrender to their not being working, and give up.
Basically, getting my blogs to work first required that I found my own connecting path between the nitty gritty operational instructions (which are covered in painstaking detail and gargantuan abundance by the available documentation) to the bigger picture, which instead seems to me to be (still) a bit too blurred to be self-explanatory.
So since there might be other (possible!) fellow dodos out there, who could benefit from my experience, I thought I’d describe here what I ended up doing to finally complete my first successful installation of a “working” blog.
You might have already discovered that the Famous 5-minute Install is one of the biggest jokes ever -at least for ning-nongs like me. But I promise that if you have the same requirements I had, or very similar ones, and follow my tutorial… once you get your first blog to work, the next 3,987,234 can be rolled out in no time at all!
Tutorial to Installing WordPress on a Remote Host (pair.com) for Mac OS X Users: Index
Step 1: Identifying requirements
Step 2: Drafting an installation plan
Step 3: Minimum requirements for running multiple installations of WordPress
Step 5: Preparing to install WordPress: Setting up the Database
Step 6: Preparing to install WordPress: Uploading the .tar.gz file to your host
Step 8: Preparing to install WordPress: Setting up the configuration file for the first Blog
Step 9: Installing and testing the first Blog (the Famous 5-Minute Install, at Long Last!)
Step 10: Fine-tuning a standard WordPress installation for single and multiple blogs
If you choose to follow my Tutorial by clicking the WordPress category link, you’ll find that the Tutorial’s eight Steps are sorted in reverse order. This is one of the interesting aspects of publishing on the Web using a Weblog… and might require some getting used to it!