Installing WordPress.

Setting up WordPress development environment

You have decided to try WordPress, that’s a great move! The purpose of this article is to get you started with setting up a WordPress development environment. Let’s explain a few terms before we dive in.

What is WordPress

WordPress is a content management system(CMS) that makes it easy to build websites and manage content without writing too much code. In other words, no HTML, CSS, or JavaScript instead you will focus on providing just content while your site is up and running. It is fast and open source too(anyone can contribute to it). With WordPress, anyone can build a website.

Wordpress.org or Wordpress.com

These are two different things and it confused me at first. Wordpress.com has limitations compared to Wordpress.org. I found this article that helps explain everything check it out.
We will be using Wordpress.org. This entails running WordPress locally on the computer. You are going to be using your computer for running and testing the WordPress site before going live.

Prerequisites

Now, what do you need to do or have?

1. Install XAMP or WAMP server on your local machine.
2. Verify that Apache and MYSQL is working.
3. Verify that phpMyAdmin is working.

Installing WordPress

1. Download WordPress at https://wordpress.org/ to get the latest version. This will download the WordPress.zip file to your local machine.
2. In your C:drive, locate the XAMPP folder. Open the htdocs folder, and create a folder called “learningwordpress” inside the htdocs folder.

Create a folder called learningwordpress

3. Unzip the WordPress.zip file, and copy its content into the “learningwordpress” folder.

Copy the WordPress file content to the “learningwordpress” folder.

4. WordPress uses MySQL for database. Open the XAMPP control panel, click on Start action for Apache and MYSQL; click on MySQL Admin to launch the phpMyAdmin.

XAMPP Control Panel

5. a) To set up Database. Click on the Database button at the top of the launch.

b) Add a database name, I used “learningword” for my database name.
Click Create button.

6. a) Open your browser and visit your site “https://localhost/foldername”, this will open a prompt to set up configuration file for WordPress installer. Three important pieces of information needed here are:

1. Database name — your database name
2. Database username — use “root”
3. Database password — leave it blank

b) Click the Submit button; run the installation, and fill in the information for your site.

7. Provide the needed information and click the Log in button.

And Voila!🙌 you have your dashboard. You can now visit your site.

Conclusion

The article is a quick guide to setting up WordPress on our local machine. We learned the installation process and running the server.

Useful Links

https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/how-to-install-wordpress/