Difference between revisions of "Creating your wordpress site"

Revision as of 21:50, 9 April 2012

In order to create your personalized Wordpress on the IAM servers you will need to follow these steps.

The first step will require you to log into the IAM Department Wordpress server via an SSH clinet in order to verfiy your account and allow the server to create a personalized Wordpress folder for you to work in.

1. If working on an IAM Dept workstation you can use the PuTTY SSH client to gain shell access to the Wordpress server. This can be done by navigating to the Windows Start menu located in the lower left hand portion of your Windows Desktop. Click on All Programs. Look for the PuTTY folder and then click on the PuTTY exe file located inside in order to launch the client. If you are working from a PC off cammpus you can download and install PuTTY from this URL http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.

  With the PuTTY clinet open enter the following information:
  
    Host Name: students.iam.colum.edu
    Port:      22

Be sure that SSH is selected as the connection type. Next click on the Open button to initiate the connection. This will open teh PuTTY console.

You will now be prompted for you IAM Department username at the login as prompt. They are typically in the form of firstname.lastname. Enter your username and hit enter on the keyboard. You will next be prompted your your IAM Department password. Supply your case sensitive password and hit enter on the keyboard.

Upon successfull authentication the system will say "creating home directory for firstname.lastname.

To view the contents of a dirtectory use the ls command and hit enter. This will display the public_html folder. To move into a new directory use teh cd command folowed by the name of your directory. The command cd public_html will move you inside of that directory. Using the ls command will display the wordpress directory. The command cd wordpress will move you inside of teh wordpress directory. Entering ls one more time will display the contents of your wordpress directory.

You may now close the PuTTY SSH session by typing in exit and hitting the enter key.

2. At this point your will want to open a web browser and navigate to the following URL in order to create a wp-config.php file.

http://students.iam.colum.edu/~firstname.lastname/wordpress

The web browser will notify you that "There doesn't seem to be a wp-config.php file. I need this before we can get started." Click on teh button labeled Creat a Configuration File to continue.

The next page will prompt you to gather a few pieces of information provided by your instructor to continue.

                        1.Database name
                        2.Database username
                        3.Database password
                        4.Database host
                        5.Table prefix

Click on the button labeled Let's Go.

3. Enter the following info into the wordpress setup page:

               1.Database name:       provided by instructor
               2.Database username    provided by instructor
               3.Database password    provided by instructor
               4.Database host        localhost
               5.Table prefix         FirstnameLastname

Once completed click on the Submit button.

4. The server will attempt to automatically generate a wp-config.php file. If it does not succed to do so automatically, do not worry, you can create on and upload it manually.

First, hightlight all of the text loacted inside of the box located in the center of the screen. Be sure to scroll down to capture all of the text. Rigth click and select copy. Next, open a simple text editor such as notepad, wordpad, or SCiTe. and paste the copied text inside. Do not use Microsoft Word for this process as it may add unneeded formatting to the file. Save the file to your desktop as wp-config.php.

Next, you will need to open an FTP client to upload the newly created wp-config.php file to wordpress server. We suggest using FileZilla which can be found in the lower left hand Windows Start menu by clicking on All Programs adn scrolling down to find the client software. If working on a PC outside of teh IAM Dept you can downlaod and install the client from here: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php

With the Filezilla FTP client open you will need to enter the following information in order to initiate an FTP session to upload your file to the remote server.

       Hostname:    students.iam.colum.edu
       Username:    firstname.lastname
       Password:    yourpasswordhere
       Port:        22

Then click on the Quickconnect button. This will bring up the files located ont eh remote server on the right hand side of the screen and the files located on your local PC on teh left hand side of the screen. On the remote server navigate to the wordpress directory.

     /firstname.lastname/public_html/wordpress

Next, drag and drop the wp-config.php file that you created earlier directly in the wordpress subdirectory on the remopte server. It is a tiny file and will only take a moment to complete. View the contents of the wordpress subdirectory to confirm teh at the wp-config.php is residing in the directory now.

After you have completed the upload, return to your browser and click on the button labelled Run the Install.

5. The server will process teh contents of your freshly uploaded wp-config.php file and then ask you to complete the installation by entering the following info.

            Site Title
            Username
            Password (entered twice)
            Email Address

Once completed click on the button labelled Install Wordpress.

The server wil then notify you that the site has been built successfully. Click on teh Log In button to log into the Wordpress Adminsitration Console. Provide teh username and password combination that you created in teh previous section in order to login.

That's it!

Your site can be accessed at http://students.iam.colum.edu/~firstname.lastname/wordpress/

You can administer your site by going to: http://students.iam.colum.edu/~firstname.lastname/wordpress/wp-admin/