Set Up WordPress the Easy Way

January 23rd, 2006 | Uncategorized

I got my domain name through godaddy with the intention of setting up my own blog using Wordpress. As usual, I did not do as much research as I should have on the subject. After the domain name was set up, I discovered that godaddy with windows hosting did not play nicely with wordpress. The Net is littered with complaints about issues people were having with their Wordpress install because of the way godaddy handles the MySQL servers. The problem seemed to be that most people could not get the php scripts to connect to the MySQL database they had set up.

I had almost given up on installing Wordpress when google found me this illuminating article on GoDaddy and Wordpress, which had links to a couple of other sites with detailed instructions on the setup.

This is what you do:

   1. Identify the required database information
          * Login to GoDaddy.com
          * Go to “Host & Servers” ->”My Hosting Account”
          * Select your registered domain and click “Open” in the Control Panel.
          * Scroll down to Databases and click on MySQL icon
          * It should now show you the Database Name, Host Name and Username
   2. Input the exact Database Name into the wp-config.php file:

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘mysql95.secureserver.net’);

This is near the top of the file.
3. Comment the following lines in wp-settings.php

//if ( !extension_loaded(’mysql’) )
// die( ‘Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.’ );

I am not sure why these lines need to be commented out even though the MySQL extensions has been loaded.

Finally, go through the Famous 5-minute install for Wordpress and you are done!.

Thanks to whoami and pradob at Wordpress Installation Support

Update Apr 17, 2006: Everything was going fine till I needed to install plugins. For the life of me, I could not get plugins recognized in the admin folder. I kept getting the “Couldn’t open Plugins folder or Plugins were not found” error message. I should mention that my Wordpress blog is hosted on godaddy servers with PHP and IIS. Here’s the fix for the error (credit goes to Jason).

Open the file “wp-admin/admin-functions.php” and find the following line. Replace the old line with the new line.

    function get_plugin_data($plugin_file) {
    //$plugin_data = implode(’’, file($plugin_file));
    $plugin_data = file_get_contents($plugin_file);

Plugins will start working with this change.

Update May 15, 2008: WordPress works so much better on Linux!. Everything simply works out of the box, no tweaking needed.