Until now I’ve never had to do a base install of WordPress. I’ve always previously used the CPanel Scripts Library utility to do the job, but then there have been some issues with that. So this weekend needing to get some development work done, I’ve decided to put WordPress’ famous claim of a five minute install to the test.
I’m a staunch supporter of the concept of Open Source software and I can’t help thinking that WordPress must be one of the most broadly used and accessible systems out there. The fact that it just works, you don’t need to pay expensive maintenance and development fees, that such a huge range of plug-ins to expand it exist and that something that’s free knocks the socks of things that cost thousands is just great.
Back to that claim… The result is that even over a 10Mb connection (no contention, direct to a 1Gb fibre switch and then to the Internet), it’s a lot more than a five minute job. Just uploading the files that make up the latest WordPress installation (v2.2.2) is not far off a ten minute job.
That said once you’ve worked out the prefixes that the SQL database and username need to work on the hosting server, following the WordPress installation steps is easy. Basically all you have to do is setup a username and password for the blog to get you started – although you’ll probably want to lose the default admin username once you’re logged in.
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