readership will drive traffic back to your website. If you cover specific, detailed, or arcane areas in your writing, Google searches for those terms should direct readers to you, where they will join the conversation. Chapter 12 looks at how your WordPress content can be more broadly distributed.
GETTING STARTED
Before any serious work on presentation, style, or content begins, you need a home for your website (despite the previous discussion about WordPress and content management systems, we will refer to your website and the actual WordPress installation that implements it interchangeably, mostly for convenience and brevity). Factors affecting your choice include:
● Cost– Free hosting services limit your options as a developer and frequently preclude you from generating money from advertising services. More expensive offerings may include better support, higher storage or bandwidth limits, or multiple database instances for additional applications.
● Control– What tools are provided for you to manage your MySQL database, files comprising the WordPress installation, and other content types? If you want to be able to muck around at the SQL level, or manage MySQL through a command-line interface, you should ensure your hosting provider supports those interfaces.
● Complexity– You can install the Apache or nginx web server with a PHP interpreter, MySQL, and the WordPress distribution yourself, but most hosting providers have wrapped up the installation process so that some of the rough edges are hidden from view. If you expect to need technical support on the underlying operating system platform, find a provider (including your own IT department) that provides that support in a reasonable time frame.
This section takes a quick look at some hosting options, walks you through the basics of a do-it-yourself installation, and concludes with an overview of the ways in which WordPress and MySQL choose to ignore each other when installation goes into the weeds.
Three broad categories of WordPress hosting exist, each with trade-offs between administrative complexity and depth of control. The easiest and most popular is to use wordpress.com, a free hosting service run by Automattic using the multi-site version of WordPress (originally WordPress MU). You can install themes and plugins through the Dashboard but you can only enable or disable the choices that come preinstalled. Further, you will not have access to the underlying MySQL databases and core code, or be able to integrate WordPress with other systems. You can redirect one of your own URLs to wordpress.com, but if you want full control over everything from the code to the URLs used, you are probably looking at a paid option. The free route may be a reasonable first step for you, but for this book it is assumed that you are going to want to perform surgery on your installation.
You will find a starter list of for-fee hosting providers on www.wordpress.org, including the paid option on wordpress.com. Most have the latest, or close to latest, releases of the WordPress core available as a package to be installed in conjunction with MySQL and a web server. The third hosting option is to install everything on servers that you own and operate. If your servers live in a hosting facility but you enjoy root administrative access that is equivalent to a do-it-yourself installation. These are all options for putting your WordPress installation on the public Internet. If you are just looking to explore, Chapter 3 covers running WordPress locally for development.
WordPress requires a web server with PHP support, a URL rewriting facility, and an instance of MySQL. Apache is the most popular option for front-ending WordPress because it provides PHP interpretation through mod_php and URL rewriting in mod_rewrite. There is growing interest in lighttpd (Lighty) and nginx as replacements for Apache. Finally, you can use Microsoft’s IIS 7.0 as a web server with its URL_rewrite module. The emphasis on URL rewriting stems from WordPress’s support for “pretty” permalinks to content entries, allowing you to create a URL tree organized by date, category, tag, or other metadata. Those mnemonic, or human-readable, URLs are converted into MySQL database queries to extract the right WordPress content based on titles or other keywords as part of the WordPress main loop, which is covered in detail in Chapter 5. Your web server decides whether the URL should be parsed by WordPress or if it refers to a specific HTML file based on what is in the .htaccess file, and the URL rewriting rules ensure that its contents are interpreted properly. Technically, URL rewriting is not required to install WordPress, but it is good to have because it gives you tremendous flexibility in the presentation and naming conventions used for your content’s URLs. Permalink design and practices are covered in more detail in Chapter 2, but keep the requirement in mind as you select your WordPress substrate.
Up to this point, MySQL has been mentioned only in passing, but a brief review of MySQL requirements rounds out the hosting prerequisite list. It is worth establishing some terminology and distinguishing between the MySQL software, database instances, and WordPress instances using MySQL. When you install and configure MySQL, you have a full-fledged relational database system up and running. It does not have to be configured on the same machine as your web server, and some hosting providers will create horizontally scalable MySQL “farms” in parallel to their web server front ends. An instance of MySQL running on a server can support multiple databases, each with a unique name. When you install WordPress, you will need to know the name of the MySQL database reserved for your content, although this information may be auto-generated and configured for you if you are using a provider that supports WordPress and MySQL as an integrated package. WordPress creates a number of relational data tables in that named database for each website that you create.
Confusion can result from nomenclature and complexity. You (or your hosting provider) may run multiple MySQL instances on multiple servers, and you will need to know where your database is hosted. Because each instance of MySQL can run multiple databases, and each database contains groups of tables, it is possible, even common, to run multiple MySQL-based applications on the same hosting platform, using one MySQL instance or even one MySQL database.
If you want to have multiple WordPress sites on the same server, you can share a single MySQL database instance for all of them provided you configure WordPress to distinguish the MySQL database table names within the MySQL database. It is a simple configuration option that is covered in the next section, and it highlights the distinction between multiple sets of tables in a database and multiple databases for distinct applications.
Once you have secured the necessary foundation, it is time to get the code up and running. Even if you are using a hosting provider that installs MySQL and WordPress for you, it is worth knowing how the server-side components interact in case you need to track down a problem when you’re deep in plugin development.
The famous, fabled, fabulous five-minute WordPress installation is a reality when everything is configured and coordinated properly. This section walks you through the steps that are often hidden from view when you use a provider with packaged installs, and highlights some of the common misfires between WordPress and MySQL instances.
The installation process is quite simple (assuming that your web server and MySQL server are already running): Download the WordPress package and install it in your web server’s directory tree, and then navigate to your top-level URL and complete the configuration. One (compound) sentence describes it completely.
It is possible and even advisable to install a fully functioning WordPress instance on your laptop or development machine, particularly if you are going to be working on the core, developing plugins, or otherwise making changes that would create embarrassing failures during testing on a public website. Mac OS X comes with an Apache web server (with PHP and URL rewriting); download MySQL from www.mysql.com, or use a prepackaged configuration such as MAMP (
