As part of creating my new blog site, I was evaluating various blog and content managements systems, namely WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I created a demo site using WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, but finally went with word press due to its simplicity, plug-in architecture and numerous freely available themes. WordPress is an open source plug-in based bogging and content management software.
Each of these content management systems can be setup in a local windows environment using XAMPP. XAMPP is a very easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin.
Once you have downloaded wordpress, you can copy the wordpress folder in htdocs folder of xampp location. Next step would be to start up the XAMMP control, by clicking on the xampp-control.exe and then start the Apache server and MySql server as shown below.
Logon to the MySql server console and create a database for wordpress. Once database is created, type in the wordpress url – i.e. http://localhost:port/wordpress to start the one click install process, which would ask you for blog name and database properties (name , user id and password), Within a minute you should be up and running with wordpress blog.
You can also migrate your blog across wordpress versions, if you plan to do that; you can refer to my earlier blog at – Migrating wordpress blog acrosss domains
Basically you can setup everything in your local environment and then push it to your domain using the steps mentioned in above link.
Start exploring wordpress by finding various themes (google them – 100 best wordpress themes :)) and apply it by copying it in wordpress\wp-content\themes directory and activate it through Appearance -> Themes option in the word press console. Similarly for plug in, you can copy it in wordpress\wp-content\plugins folder and activate it through Plugins option in the word press console.
Some of the plugins, I have been using in this blog is – Amazon Showcase (for Amazon) , All in One SEO Pack (for Search engine optimizations) , Google Analyticator (for Google analytics) , Share and Follow and Social Media Widget (social networking) , Google XML Sitemaps (for XML sitemaps) , WP-Polls ( for managing Polls) and WP-reCAPTCHA (a must to avoid spams). The theme that’s being used in my site is Scarlett, which I have customized it a bit.
Hope this would give you some insights on how to setup a blog quickly using wordpress. Start blogging !!
