After my last post, ranting about dynamic publishing systems, I decided to take a look at WordPress for myself. What is more I decided to do so on my Powerbook.
It turned out to be very easy indeed.
First I cleaned up my old Fink installation. I've never used any of the Fink packages I installed eons ago (incl. mysql) and I couldn't get the mysql package to run properly at all. A simple rm -rf /sw did the trick.
Next I found MySQL and PHP via Marc Liyanage's site, which turns out to be an excellent resource for running popular OSS solutions on the Mac.
Following the instructions on how to install both packages is trivial (just double click the installers and make a small ownership tweak with chown for MySQL). After this the usual <?php phpinfo() ?> test worked like a charm already. It had even started Apache for me.
Next WordPress itself. The installation really is as simple as it says on the site. Unzip the package, edit wp-config-sample.php and give it the login-name and password you use for MySQL (if you follow Marc's instructions you should have this info. For instance "root".). It also needs the database name. This triggered me because I wasn't sure it meant an existing database or one it would create. Just to be sure I created a database by running mysql -u root -p (enter password) and telling it CREATE DATABASE wordpress;. After this I could tell it exit. Having created the database and entered its name in the php-file I saved it as wp-config.php.
Next I just move the entire contents of the WordPress directory to the sites directory in my homedir and opened http://127.0.0.1/~myname/wp-admin/install.php. It gave some warning (which might have been something to do with the database already being there, so I perhaps I could have skipped the database-creation step. Anyway, the installation is a wizard. You just click through it, it gives you feedback on what it does and after a few clicks you're done and you can log in to your new WordPress installation.
Very simple. Very clean.
Once I've had more time to play with it I might report on WordPress itself; its features and problems... For now, if you are thinking about using WordPress you know installing it, at least, isn't hard.
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