Installing the latest version of WordPress
Step 1: Download WordPress
First step, navigate on over to the download page at WordPress.org. Do not download WordPress on any other third party site.
You can download either the .zip or .tar.gz file, both contain the same files. You would probably rather download the .zip if you are a Windows user. Once you have extracted the files you will be ready to upload the files to your hosting account. Go ahead and click the link below to see the next page in the tutorial.
Step 2: Extract the files
You should have extracted all the files in the latest.zip or latest.tar.gz and have them all ready to go in a directory on your local machine. I use Windows XP, and it will look some of like this.
Keep in mind that some of the icons may look slightly different for you depending on the default programs you have chosen for the filetypes.
Next you will need an FTP client to upload the files to your web host. If you still don’t have a host at this point, we highly recommend Micfo for affordable shared and reseller solutions. They even have Fantastico on all accounts, so you don’t even need this manual installation tutorial. Okay, back to the FTP client. We recommend using either FileZilla or SmartFTP. Both are free and relatively straightforward to use. Make sure you download the Client and not the server. We will be using FileZilla for the next part of our tutorial.
Step 3: Upload files to your host
Using FileZilla, it’s easy to upload files directly from your computer to your hosting account. Open it up, type in your login details at the top and click the Quickconnect button.
You should have a screen like you see above. Make sure you are uploading within the public folder, which is usually called /public_html/. If you want to install to a subdirectory, that’s fine as well. Once you have uploaded all the WordPress files and folders in the same structure as in the .zip or .tar.gz file, you are ready to set up your database.
Step 4: Set up the database
This is where it may get a little tricky. We will be using cPanel for the example. When you login to your cPanel account, you should see something like this below.
Different versions may differ, the important thing is to navigate to the MySQL® Databases page. You should now be at a page which looks like this.
On this page you will create the MySQL database, and the user that connects to it. Keep in mind that this not related to the WordPress admin login, we will get to that step next. First, type in the name you want to call your database. For this example, we will simply call it wordpress. The next step is to create a user which will connect to the database. For purposes of the example we will use dbuser as the username and you can use your imagination for the password. Please make sure you write down the password you use temporarily, because it is needed for the next step. You will then need to add that user to the database you just created with All privileges. You should now have something that looks like this.
Notice the prefix of yourusername_ in the database name and username. This is your username for your hosting account. You will need to use the database name and username as you see it on this page, or it won’t work. Next we will actually start installing WordPress via the web-based installation script.
Step 5: Install WordPress …finally
it’s almost done now. You have already uploaded the WordPress folders and files to your hosting account and set up the database. Now it’s time to navigate to the URL you have installed it on via your web browser. If everything was uploaded properly, you should see a page like this.
Yes, that’s right, you are supposed to see an error. Why? Because WordPress doesn’t know how to connect to the database you’ve just created. Go through the create a wp-config.php file through a web interface page and enter the database details. You probably won’t need to edit the last two fields.
Hopefully there won’t be any errors. If there are you will need to create a wp-config.php file manually. After the database has been configured to work with WordPress, it’s smooth sailing. Everything past this should be relatively straightforward. Just type in the title of your blog, your e-mail, and you are done. Your username should be admin and your password will be automatically generated for you. Go ahead and login and change this if you want.
You should have something like this as your final result.
