My take on how to install Wordpress

Note: I was told that I could have installed Wordpress in 5 seconds using Fantastico, although some hosts do not "offer" the thing. I was told also that the steps I outlined below are generally correct and thus useful to those without Fantastico on their cPanel. Sigh.

I have recently gotten myself a hosting account at ploghost.com for the domain pinoyseminars.com and immediately set out to install a Wordpress blog. I did so because, in my short stint as a blogger, I learned that you can do more with a Wordpress blog than one in Blogger.

My problem was that I had no idea how to do it. I posted a query at ploghost.com/forum/ but didn't get any reply. I was forced to try following the step-by-step Wordpress's 5 minute installation guide. Unfortunately, I ended up with an error message. I had to restudy everything until I found what was wrong. I am proud to say the blog is now up and running at pinoyseminars.com/blog/.

For non-techies like me, this is my take on how to do the installation:

1. Download the latest stable release of Wordpress at http://wordpress.org/download/.
2. Unzip the compressed Wordpress folder.
3. Log into your cPanel at www.yourdomain.com/cpanel.
4. Click on MySQL Databases.
5. Create a database and take note of the database name.
6. Create a user and take note of the username.
7. Add the user to the database you created.
8. Open the unzipped Wordpress folder and find the file wp-config-sample.php.
9. Rename the file as wp-config.php.
10. Double click on the file to open it at Notepad.
11. Replace the word "wordpress" with the name of the database you created.
12. Replace the word "username" with the database user you created.
13. Replace the word "password" with the password of the database user you created.
14. Save the wp-config.php file.
    
15. Upload all the contents of the Wordpress folder by FTP to the "public_html" folder of your hosting account.
    
16. Or, instead of 15, rename the Wordpress folder with a subdirectory name (i.e. blog) and upload the whole folder by FTP to the "public_html" folder of your hosting account.
17. In your browser, go to "yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php" or "yourdomain.com/subdirectory/wp-admin/install.php" to install Wordpress.
18. At this time, Wordpress should now be installed and you can now log in to start building your blog.

I hope this will help others who want to install Wordpress, especially the non-techie ones who like me happen to have no techie friends ready to help. My message is that, you can do it on your own. I did.