Simple Steps to Install WordPress on your Computer [WordPress Weekend]

• Tweet

• Tweet

We love wordpress and even started ‘wordpress weekend’ to share tips to use wordpress effectively.

If you run a wordpress blog on your server, it’s strongly recommended that you play with wordpress themes/plugins on your local computer first (and push to the server later) – and for this, you need to install wordpress on your local machine.

wordpress tips

Here are two simplistic ways to install wordpress on your computer (each one of this will take 5-10 minutes maximum).

XAMPP Route

Follow these steps for a blissful installation

• Download and install xampp (link) – this will install Apache web server and MySQL, PHP and Perl on your machine.
• Download wordpress files (link)
• Once you have installed xampp (say D:\xampp), unzip wordpress files in D:\xampp\htdocs folder.
• Your directory structure will look like this: D:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress
• At this point feel free to rename the ‘wordpress’ directory to any name of your choice.

[Action] – Start your servers – Go to ‘D:\xampp and click on xampp_start.exe

wordpress installer

Create Database to Configure WordPress

• Hop to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and create a Database (Collation: utf8_unicode_ci). Ofcourse, you need a user id as well – so create that one and assign the user to ‘All Privileges’ for your wordpress DB.
• Once done, hit http://localhost/wordpress (assuming ‘wordpress’ is your site name). The famous 5-min install will guide you through the entire process.

That’s it!! It’s as simple as that.

Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Microsoft’s web platform installer is a free tool that makes it easy install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.

The installer installs IIS web server, SQL Server 2008 Express DB, .Net Framework and once the installer is live on your system, click ‘Web Application Gallery’ and install wordpress.

What’s interesting about MS’s Web PI is that the whole installation is very easy (simple wizard/just keep clicking ‘Next’) and the product installs components based on the software you choose to install (for instance php/mysql for wordpress)

Our Recommendation

Go for XAMPP route – it’s fairly easy, consumes less memory and most importantly, you get the exact software configuration that your live wordpress blog will run on. Take MS’s Web PI route, only when you want to play with several other applications.