Installing WordPress Manually
As I said before, WordPress can be downloaded for a manual installation, which is extremely easy and requires no previous programming skills or advanced blog-user experience. It’s simply some kind of ready-set-go type of blogging engine where you can easily start even if you are blogging for the first time. For the automatic installation, we will discuss how to set it up with the different administration tools available in cPanel.
First of all, download WordPress from its website at http://wordpress.org/download/. It is available in both Gzip (tar.gz) and ZIP (.zip) format. Take a look at the following screenshot in which the download links are available on the right side; you may download either of them. If you are using Windows XP or Linux operating systems, you don’t need to have any unzipping utility for extracting. Windows XP and later versions can directly extract files from compressed ZIP files. You will also get a built-in extraction facility if you are using Linux.
wordpress manual installation
Before installing WordPress, please check the minimal requirements. You must have a web server that supports PHP. The best web server that you can count on is Apache. For PHP, you must have at least version 4.2 or later installed on your machine. WordPress will also run with PHP 5.x.x series without any problem. Besides, you require a MySQL database server; you must have at least MySQL version 3.23.23 or later installed on your machine. You may also have a local or remote MySQL server with complete privileges to create tables required for WordPress. If your web server meets all these requirements, it is surely ready to proceed further. Let us take a look at these minimum requirements once again. Apache mod_rewrite is also required for a user-friendly URL.
Apache mod_rewrite is installed by default in most web hosting accounts. If you are hosting your own account, you can enable mod_rewrite by modifying the Apache web server configuration file. You can check the URL http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/enable-mod-rewrite-on-apache to know how to enable mod_rewrite on your web server. If you are running on shared hosting, then ask your system administrator to install it for you. However, it is more likely that you already have it installed on your hosting account.
Let us download the archive (either in .zip or .tar.gz format) of WordPress. Besides the remote installation of WordPress, I strongly suggest installing a local version as well. If you plan to develop themes or plug-ins, testing and deploying them directly to the remote server may require more time than testing and deploying them locally. Let us try the remote installation. If you extract the WordPress ZIP file, it will look something like this:
apache2triad wordpress
Just note that there is a readme.html file inside this folder that gives you a very good introduction to many different features of WordPress.
Now we need to upload all these files to our website using any FTP client. There are several FTP clients available on the Internet for free usage (or as a shareware). Here we will use Filezilla (http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/) as an FTP client to connect to our FTP server and then upload these files. Following is a step-by-step guide to the installation process.
You can also use the popular web-based FTP applications Net2FTP at http://www.net2ftp.com or Web2FTP at http://web2ftp.com. Using these packages, you can upload archives from the Internet and they will automatically uncompress the archive. I found it really useful, because now I can always stay in touch with my FTP server without installing any desktop application.
