I have been working off-an-on for the past couple of days to get my WordPress 1.5 WAMP package installed locally. My installation guide has come from Reza Baharin‘s Tutorial: Running a personal website on Apache HTTP server on WinXP is specifically tailored to WordPress.

First, let me say this guide is excellent and without it I’m sure I would still be pulling my hair out. While i did indeed have some installation difficulties, in truth most were self-inflicted and arose from being too impatient, inattentive or careless. But, these frustrations were real and I try to summarize them so that others may not make my same mistakes:

• My first mistake was not to use the vanilla directory structure and naming suggested in the guide. Rather, I installed everything in my rather complicated, nested existing file system. That poor choice continued to give me fits as my paths were too long and deep and my naming conventions (‘1 – MainA’, ‘2 – MainB’, etc.) were also difficult when I needed to go directly into DOS
• My second mistake was to not read all of the tutorial carefully and in advance. I plunged into the first pages and found I was following directions at the top of the tutorial for restores, yet I had not even done the initial install. I ended up doing some tweaks and settings that I had no business worrying about
• My third mistake was not properly understanding network domain, server name, and computer name for the Apache (and later MySQL) installation. I kept getting confused between use of ‘localhost’ and actual names
• My fourth mistake was not knowing how to do relative addressing of directories in the configuration files, especially for PHP, which I had a trying time to get to load. Because of these difficulties, I did not know how to properly set my URLs in Mozilla to load the PHP test (phpinfo.php). Hint: make sure your URL address begins with localhost. In the guide’s Test PHP section, refer to the URL address screenshot shown for Test Perl to get this reference correct
• And, finally, my last mistake was really not understanding the MySQL settings for ‘host’, ‘user’ and ‘password’. The only solution I found was to delete the MySQL installation and re-install with host=localhost, user=root and password="" [blank]. If you run into similar problems, carefully note your error messages and use them as a basis for a Google search (see this one, for example).

However, despite all of this, at about 8 pm tonight I had a Web server running on my local machine with a local copy of WordPress. Thanks Reza and thanks to all of the WAMP and WordPress developers!

Author’s Note:  I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so.  Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005.  To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate.  However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged.  A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005.  mkb

Unfortunately, in order to test design and content for my blog-in-waiting, I needed to set up my local machine as a Web server and, therefore, obtain all of the necessary supporting software. Because my selection of WordPress as blog software was open source, all other software components would be open source as well.

Many open source packages go by the acronym LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). WordPress falls into this category, but it also has a WAMP configuration (Windows instead of Linux), which is my local machine’s operating system. As a result, I downloaded the WordPress 1.5 WAMP package and prepared to do battle.

Though my employees have set up these environments for years, I had never done so. I consider myself only marginally competent in such matters, and therefore dangerous when around software and standing water simultaneously.

Again, since my intent was to see how a “standard” individual would go about setting up the whole blog environment, I purposely chose not to ask any of my colleagues for help. If I couldn’t find the guidance and references on the Web, I just wouldn’t be able to proceed and do it.

After some searching, my first breakthough in finding an installation guide came from Reza Baharin. Reza’s Tutorial: Running a personal website on Apache HTTP server on WinXP is specifically tailored to WordPress.

I will get the components installed on my machine and then see in the next day or so if I can indeed get it running!

Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb

As a way of getting my first taste of what a blog is, how difficult it is to set up, and how one maintains it, I set up a test site on Blogger. The ease of setting up the site was remarkable! Truly, within five minutes of sign-up, I was editing and working with a blog site. It is clear why blogging has grown so fast, with reportedly 5 million of the sites alone being hosted by Blogger!.

However, because my interests go more to scale and bleeding edge funcitonality, I will forego using a hosted site (though it appears to be the right answer for most users). Instead, I will investigate and chose my own software package(s).

Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Preparing to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb