Installing WordPress 4

I'm personally not a big fan of the WordPress system. It's done a lot of good for a lot of people, but I find it restrictive and confusing. My biased opinion may be due to never learning how to use it by reading their literature and instead assuming that I could guess my way through everything. My first go at it was in 2008. My second was in 2015 where I was helping a relative with her site. She wanted to get the Googles integrated properly.

If you have any future plans for eCommerce through your website, go with Drupal. If you just need some interactivity of ideas with the public or a private group via the Internet, then maybe WP is sufficient for you.

If you plan on only serving out your own single, solitary WordPress site, the official Ubuntu documentation for WP is enough to get you there. If your web-server will be Virtual Hosting many websites and/or more than one WordPress instance, then the Ubuntu Community Wiki page for WP is for you. I'll be demonstrating something more in line with the Community Wiki version.

Based on what the WordPress.org | Download site say's, you can have the whole site up and running in 5 minutes after the download and unzip is done. The procedure is basically:

  1. Unzip their latest file and move the unpacked contents into the Virtual Hosts root directory.
  2. Make a database user and database name (with linked privileges as you would for a Drupal site), for that specific WP instance on that Virtual Host.
  3. open up that FQDN of the host with "/wp-admin/install.php" after the ".com", and answer the basic questions.

Maybe if I wasn't demonstrating, I could do it in 5 minutes, but the video is 20+ minutes long! Five minutes my ass!

The Ubuntu Community method will install the 4.4.2 version of WordPress and at the time of this writing WP was up to version 4.8.1, but if you really, really, really want to do it the Ubuntu way:

  • System => Software Packages => Install a New Package => Package from APT
    • Put "wordpress" in the textbox for "Package from APT" click it's radio button and click the green button for "Install"
  • Others => File Manager
    • Navigate to "/usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples" and
    • In the Action column, click the "Extract Archive" tool which is where the "Edit" tool usually is on the row for the setup-mysql.gz bundle
  • In a Terminal window
    • ssh <root user name>@<localhost machine name>e.g. ssh bigboypants@aWordPressThing
    • sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n <the user ID with matching database name for this site in MySQL> <the FQDN for the site that will work via WordPress>
    • e.g. sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wp_shoes blog.shoes.com
  • Servers => Apache Webserver

The rest should be self explanatory.

Next Page: WordPress.org