Wordpress

[karen2205]

Can those of you with more geek points than me sanity check this for me?

I want to install Wordpress on http://www.wonderfuldreams.me.uk so I can keep a very public blog somewhere off LiveJournal (partly for reasons of fewer restrictions on what I can say, partly because I'm not using my site for much at the moment and I would like to do something useful with it, partly for the online presence of a very public blog that's identifiably mine).

The lovely people at BCN host wonderfuldreams for me. I have their standard hosting package.

If I've understood Wordpress's installation requirements all I need to do is pay BCN for database access and then follow the instructions. Am I missing something? Is the installation more complicated than those instuctions contemplate?

I am *not* at this stage interested in moving the hosting elsewhere. BCN are small and provide excellent customer service. That's worth much more to me than one-click installation or marginally cheaper hosting.

I am prepared to consider systems other than Wordpress, if anyone has suggestions of other suitable software to try.

Ideally I'd like to set up something that'd automatically post anything I post publicly to LiveJournal there as well. I'm not sure an RSS feed is quite what I'm looking for, as that is reliant (if I understand it properly) on the content on LiveJournal being available for the software to read it. I want something that'll take the content and turn it into an independent, properly formatted post over there, as well as posting it on LJ.

Comments

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

The lovely people at BCN host wonderfuldreams for me

You had me going for a minute there!

Wordpress installation is dead easy: I know no php and my SQL is under 15 years of dust and I still got it sorted in, oh I think it was about an hour. You just need suitable versions of SQL and to be able to run php on your webspace.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I've installed Wordpress on a BCN hosted account with the database access you mention so definitely doable :-)

I don't remember it being hard, but there may be things that are easy for somebody like me who plays with databases etc all day long that wouldn't for somebody who doesn't - if you can't figure anything out, just ask.

Posting your public LJ stuff to Wordpress is a bit trickier - there may be a Wordpress plug-in that will merge an RSS feed with your posts at a guess. I'm sure somebody else can answer that better than me.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

And it works with their standard account? It's a bit confusing that they mention offering PHP with that account but later say that for full CGI you need a shell account. I'd have thought giving unrestricted PHP would be equivalent (in security terms) to full CGI, but perhaps they just use the safe mode or something - I have little experience of PHP.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've got a standard non-shell account. I know they're still on PHP4 because safe mode or whatever doesn't work with PHP5. I had a nightmare of a time finding a wiki that would work (I'm using pmwiki no which I'm not all that keen on) but mostly that was because they use an oldish version of MySQL I seem to remember. No problems with wordpress though.

[karen2205]

OK, I fail at the second hurdle:)

I've ordered MySQL from BCN (at lunch time today) and it appears in my list of orders. I have an email stating:

For reference you ordered:
MySQL database enigma: users userenigma and adminenigma
on host mysql.blackcatnetworks.co.uk

And I can't work out how to get access to it. ftp-ing to tuschin doesn't work. I can log in to tuschin as myself but can't see anything that looks database like. mysql.blackcatnetworks.co.uk isn't ftp-able. Do I need some specialist software?

I'm feeling somewhere between stupid for not being able to do something that ought to be basic and straightforward and scared I've misunderstood what a database is.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

No, you're not being stupid! It's the sort of thing you don't know unless you've done quite a bit of PHP stuff.

You use a tool called phpAdmin at https://tuschin.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/phpmyadmin/
which BCN provides.

Give that a go. You'll need to create a database I suspect and then Wordpress will want to know the name etc. of the database - I think there's a create database button if you go to PHPAdmin - if it's not obviouos, let me know and I'll check how you do it.

[karen2205]

Hey, I did it!

I didn't need to play with the database in the end, only to know what the right name was for the wp-config.php file and I'd already got that (ie. enigma, the database name) but didn't realise it until I went to play with phpMyadmin.

It was then a matter of some intuition that the host is mysql.blackcatnetworks.co.uk and not localhost and realising from an error message that the database user for the wp-config.php file had to be the admin one and not the user one.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Super! There really ought to be a way that doing all this sort of stuff was easier for non-techy folk. You're obviously savvy and persistent enough to figure it all out, but it really should be much easier. I might drop Jon at BCN a line to tell them that it might not do any harm to put up BCN-specific instructions for Wordpress.

[shepline.livejournal.com]

Once you've got the MySQL database setup, and you've changed a few connection settings in one config file it pretty much is one click install.

That said, it's written in PHP so if you are more used to ASP you could try the excellent (and also free and simple) Forest Blog (http://www.hostforest.co.uk/)...