How to Manually Install WordPress
- Ben Bush
WordPress is an amazing tool many people use when building their sites. Be it a blog, business site, or informational site, there are plenty of things this Content Source Manager (CSM) can do! WordPress also happens to be famous for its ease of installing to a server, and guess what? We're going to make it even easier! Just follow these steps and you'll be able to have WordPress up and running in no time!
Login to your cPanel, and create a database and database user. NOTE: Be sure to open a word document, or have a pen and paper near you to write your full database name, database username, and password you create. You will need to use them later!
Go to https://wordpress.org and select the 'Download WordPress' button to the right to download a .zip file of the latest version of WordPress.
Now that you have WordPress downloaded, we need to upload it to your File Manager. From cPanel, scroll down until you find a section labeled 'Files' and then select the icon labeled 'File Manager.'
A small popup window should appear asking what directory you wish to access. Select the one labeled 'Web Root (public_html)' and below select the check box to 'Show all Hidden Files' then press Go.
Once inside the File Manager, look at the top toolbar and select the 'Upload' tool.
On the next window, select the Choose File button to then locate your Wordpress .zip file. Once selected, it will automatically upload to your File Manager. Once you show the file has uploaded, select the blue hyperlink in the middle of the window to return to the 'Public_html' directory.
Once back, you should see your uploaded Wordpress.zip file in the main section of the File Manager. To have it work, we need to extract the file. Left click on the Wordpress.zip file once so it is highlighted in blue. Then you need to locate the icon labeled 'Extract' on the top right section of the File Manger tool bar.
From there, select the Extract Files button which will leave you with a blue folder labeled 'Wordpress' in your main File Manager section.
Navigate inside the blue 'Wordpress' folder by double clicking on the folder itself. This will take you to the /public_html/wordpress folder where all the basic folders and files for wordpress are stored. We need to move everything inside this folder into the /public_html folder. We start this by locating the Select All button which is a small button located below the View icon in your main File Manager toolbar. Once selected, everything in the folder will be highlighted in blue. Proceed by hitting the Move File icon, located towards the left of the main toolbar.
A small popup window will appear asking what directory you wish to move the files to. In the directory path listing, remove the 'wordpress' ending in the path so all you have showing is '/public_html/' then select the Move File(s) button.
Once that is done, you will see that the directory you are now in is empty. Select the, Up One Level button just above the empty directory listing to return to the 'public_html' directory, which will now have all of your Wordpress files. Scroll down the folder/file listing until you find a file labeled 'wp-config-sample.php' Select that file one time so it is highlighted in blue, then locate the 'Rename' tool from the File Manager toolbar. Rename the file to 'wp-config.php' and save the changes.
We now need to link your database to the wordpress files. To do this, select the 'wp-config.php' file once to highlight it in blue, then select the 'Code Editor' tool from the File Manager toolbar.
Select the Edit button from the popup window to login to the editor. From there you will need to locate lines 19, 22, and 25 and replace the 'Database_name', 'Database_username', and 'Database_Password' with your Database, Database Username, and Database Password. Once they have been entered, like 'tikisurf_tiki1' as you see below, go to the top right section of the editor and save the changes.
Almost done! All that's left is just going to your website and installing the Wordpress software to the database. Open a new tab in your web browser and go to your domain! You should now see a Wordpress page on your site asking to select the language you want the install to be in. After choosing your language, you will see a screen where it will ask you to choose a username and password you will use to login to the site building editor. Once you add that, along with your site's name and a contact email address, press Install Wordpress on the bottom of the screen to complete!
NOTE: With security as an ever increasing issue on the web I would encourage not setting the username as something so generic as 'admin.' Keep it something unique, along with your password to help reduce the risk of any compromise!
The installation should now be complete. You can confirm this by re-loading your website. You should see a default welcome to WordPress page, which means you can start building! You will also get an email confirming the installation which will contain the url to access your Wordpress editor. If you don't see that, the url will be your domain followed by /wp-admin (http://thetikisurfshop.com/wp-admin for example) where you will enter the username and password you just created to login.
