What are the minimum requirements to install WordPress? How do I install or update WordPress?

Chapter 1: The minimum requirements
Chapter 2: How to install WordPress
Chapter 3: Updating WordPress

Chapter 1: The minimum requirements

The minimum requirements to install WordPress are really basic so almost every hosting should fulfill them. Here they are: a hosting account with PHP 4.3 (or greater) support and a MySQL Database version 4.0 (or greater).

If you don’t have a hosting yet or your hosting doesn’t fit the minimum requirements have a look at the Hosting and FTP applications FAQ.

Chapter 2: How to install WordPress

Installing a WordPress Blog is really easy and fast.

All you need to do is click here and hit the Download button to start the download process.

Unzip the file and you will find a folder named “wordpress”.

Now you need to decide whether you want your URL to look like
yourdomain.com
or
yourdomain.com/NameOfTheFolder/
If you want it to look like the first one you need to upload only the content of the “wordpress” folder. Otherwise, if you want it to look like the second one, rename the “wordpress” folder to whatever you want and upload the whole folder (recommended especially if you plan multiple websites under the same domain or the same website in multiple languages).

If you don’t know how to upload the files to your server visit the Hosting and FTP applications FAQ and read how an FTP application works.

Visit the website’s address to start the installation process.

For the example I will rename the folder to “demo” so it will be reachable under
wordpressfaq.org/demo/
when visiting the URL you uploaded the WordPress Blog to you will see the following page:



Hit “Create a Configuration File” and you get forwarded to this window:



Hit “Let’s go!”

Enter the required information:



I would recommend you to change the Table Prefix. If you want to have multiple languages I would recommend you to take the short form of the language as prefix.

Hit Submit and it would be great if you would see the following message:



It means that everything’s going fine. Hit Run the install.



Enter a title for the blog and your e-mail address (a real one).

Hit Install WordPress and you will be showen a Username and a password to login to the WordPress Blog. You will be able to change the password after you logged in for the first time. This info will also be sent to you as e-mail to the previously specified address.



Hit Login and Login.



Once you logged in you will see this page:



On the left side menu go to Users, Authors & Users. Click on your nickname to enter a new password of your choice, a nickname of your choice and more and hit Update Profile.

I would also recommend you to check the “Disable visual editor when writing” since it easily causes some problems. To me the result is much cleaner when working without it.



Under Settings, Privacy you can choose whether you want your Blog to appear on search engines like Google or not.

Unser Settings, General you can define a lot of things like the Date format, The Blog title and The tag line.

Settings, Permalinks is also really important to me. I usually choose Custom and type

/%postname%/

into the field. So the URL of a post on my Blog will look like
wordpressfaq.org/demo/TitleOfThePost/
Since it’s not a Daily-Blog I don’t mind about the date a certain post was added hence I don’t want it to appear in the web address of the post.

Chapter 3: Updating WordPress

When there’s a new version of WordPress available you will see a message displaying at the top of your administration area.

Hit “Please update now” and you will be redirected to Tools, Upgrade.



Before you update your Blog it is recommended to make a backup of it.

Hit “Upgrade automatically” and WordPress will install the new version.



That’s it.

If you want to get notified when a new version is released subscribe to the Newsletter on the WordPress download page here.