Step-by-step guide to installing Wordpress on Windows 8
Now let’s say you want to go online with your own blog. So you can just go about purchasing a domain name and install Wordpress. Sounds great! But if you are not sure whether you will be able to write blogs on a regular basis, then I suggest you first install Wordpress on your local machine and practice writing blogs for 2-3 months before buying a domain.
Well there are other reasons why you would want to install Wordpress locally such as:
- You want to try out new plugins, or themes before pushing them on your actual website/blog.
- Or you want to do some development on Wordpress to customize your blog
- You are geek and want to understand how Wordpress works
- You want to host your blog / website on your server (with static IP) and point the domain name to it
- As said earlier, you want to check whether you can write enough on your blog
So let’s install Wordpress on your OS. Now you could download PHP, MySQL and Wordpress individually from their websites or you can choose to use Microsoft Web Platform Installer and let it do the downloading and installing stuff for you.
Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer from here and once you have done it, you can follow these steps
Step One: Search and select Wordpress in Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Search and select Wordpress and WebMatrix in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and once done, click on Install.
Step Two: Select it for installation
Step Three: Select MySQL to be installed on your machine
Step Four: Setting up root password for MySQL database
Setting up password for user ‘root’ of MySql database. Keep this password safe, you might need it. Let’s say you entered XYZ.
Step Five: Completing the Wizard, setting up Wordpress
Database Admin: root
Database Admin Password: XYZ
Database User Name: wordpressuser
Database Password: Your-Password
Database Server: localhost
Database Name: wordpress
Step Six: Accessing your website
You can install WebMatrix from Microsoft Platform Installer to be able to view and manage Wordpress with more ease.
You can visit the website on http://localhost:22059 as visible in WebMatrix to view your Wordpress site and configure it.
Step Seven: Configuring your Wordpress site
To install and test plugins/themes, or view Wordpress code you can browse the folder in My Web Sites
That’s it. Wordpress is all yours on your own machine. You have latest versions of Wordpress, MySQL and PHP installed on your machine by following 7-simple steps!
