Ok so I have decided to design my first Word Press Theme for release. Rather than set up a test install on this website I have decided to install Word Press on my Windows Vista Box here at work. Yes you can install it on Windows Vista and hey guess what it actually works. It’s great, it work exactly the same as a hosted version, there is no messing around with FTP, you can hack and change things, test plugins etc etc.

So if you are a Word Press user then your really should consider doing this. This is how you do it.

1. First grab this program called XAMPP Lite, you can download it from here.

2. Install the program, now with Vista it is recommended that you install it outside of the Program Files Directory. I chose a separate drive for my install.

I chose not to install Apache and MySQL as services in the next step, but if you want to install them as services then go ahead and place a tick in the boxes.

4. The Control Panel then launches and you can start MySQL and Apache.

5. File Locations that you need to know about.

Ok now that the install in complete and MySQL and Apache have started the home directory for the web server is located in the htdocs folder in the location that you installed XXAMP. In my case the location is D:\xampp\htdocs. If you go to your browser and type in http://localhost you should get the XAMPP Slash Screen.

6. Install Word Press

What I did was create a new directory underneath the htdocs directory and called it wordpress, Downloaded the latest version of Word Press (2.5.1) and extracted it into that directory.

7. Create a Database

Next go to your phpMyAdmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/) and create a database. And also add a user and give that user the correct privileges for the database. Open the wp-config-sample.php file that is located in the root of the wordpress folder and adjust these lines:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘wordpress’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpassword’); // …and password

Once this has been changed save the file as wp-config.php. Then goto this URL http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and follow the bouncing ball.

There we have it Word Press is now installed on Windows Vista and we can now start playing!

Over the coming week I will be taking you through my project that I am undertaking on creating a custom Word Press Theme, so to keep updated SUBSCRIBE to MY RSS Feed.

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