Install WordPress

Introduction

WordPress is a free and open source content management system (CMS). Originally, its focus was on providing a platform for blogging, but throughout the last decade plus, it has become a general purpose CMS that can serve as a website builder. Two sites exist to provide access to WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a hosting solution, which means that customers can sign up and create a free WordPress site. Since its hosted, customers are only responsible for their content and not for managing the core WordPress installation and its updates. Various paid plans can extend the functionality offered to WordPress.com customers.

WordPress.org is maintained by the WordPress Foundation, which oversees the development of the software and which provides access to the WordPress software. When we download the WordPress software, we download it from WordPress.org. Unlike the hosted solution, when we install and setup WordPress on our own servers, we become responsible for administrating its installation and for keeping the software updated.

WordPress is widely used software, and because of that, it's often the focus of attack. Take a moment to read about the developers's efforts to protect WordPress: Security. We will not need to update our WordPress installs during the course of this course, but you should be familiar with the update process in case you decide to maintain your install or an install at a future date: Updating WordPress.

Libraries and WordPress

Many libraries use WordPress as as their main website and a quick web search will reveal them. For example, I quickly found an example of a (beautiful) WordPress library site for the Reading Public Library (RPL) in Massachusetts. These library websites coordinate with additional solutions that provide integrated library systems and other electronic resource services. RPL, for instance, connects their WordPress installation, which serves as their main website page, with the open source Evergreen ILS, which serves their OPAC. Check this by clicking on RPL's Library Catalog link, and you will see that it takes you to a different URL.

Aside: it is this need to coordinate so many services across all these websites that in part drives the need to develop standards for data exchange and work flow processes. For those of you have taken my electronic resource management course, you will recall we spent an entire module on this topic.

Many library websites are partitioned like this. Thus, when we install WordPress soon, it is as if we are only installing the front entrance to the library. Libraries are generally like this. They have one main website (like https://libraries.uky.edu) but then connect to other sites that provide access to OPACS, discovery systems, OverDrive or other eBook vendors, bibliographic databases, and more. This is part of the confusion around how libraries provide electronic resources. There are efforts to make all these components connect more seamlessly (e.g., through discovery systems), but if we were to model this to the walking around world, it would be like having a library that has multiple buildings, where each building provides one thing: one building for books, one building for journals, another building for other journals, another building for another set of journals, another building for looking up where to find journals, another building for special collections, and so on. I digress.

You can read the announcement about RPL's WordPress launch at: Reading Public Library Launches New WordPress Site. The announcement describes how various plugins were used to offer patrons additional functionality and describes other basic changes that come with the new site. The plugins they added display business hours and help manage events and event attendees.

Plugins are often used with WordPress sites to offer all sorts of additional capabilities. Currently, there are nearly 60 thousand plugins available for WordPress, but some are of higher quality and utility than others. In addition to the thousands of available plugins, there are nearly 12 thousand free themes for WordPress sites. Plus, many businesses offer paid themes or can offer customized themes based on customer needs. These themes can drastically alter the appearance and usability of a WordPress site or cater a site for a specific clientele, such as a library.

Installation

So far I have shown you how to install software using two methods:

  • using the apt command
  • downloading from GitHub

In this lesson, we are going to install WordPress by downloading the most recent version from WordPress.org and installing it manually. The WordPress application is available via the apt command, but the apt process makes it a bit more confusing than it should be, oddly.

We are going to kind of follow the documentation provided by WordPress.org. You should read through the documentation before following my instructions, but then follow the process I outline here instead because the documentation uses some different tools than we'll use.

Another reason we do this manually is because it builds on what we have learned by building our bare bones ILS. That is, the two processes are similar. In both cases, we create a specific database for our platform, we create a specific user for that database, and we provide login credentials in a specific file.

First, read through but don't follow the following instructions:

How to install WordPress

Customized Installation Process

After you have read through the WordPress.org documentation, follow the steps below to complete the manual install:

Step 1: Requirements

All major software has dependencies. For example, our bare bones OPAC depends on MySQL and PHP to provide the database (MySQL) and the glue (PHP) between our HTML and the database. The same is true for WordPress. However, since WordPress is much more complicated software than our bare bones OPAC, its dependencies are stricter. This means that when we plan to download software outside of the apt ecosystem, we need to make sure that our systems meet the requirements for our installation. The WordPress.org Requirements page states that the WordPress installation requires at least PHP version 7.4 and MySQL version 5.7. We can check that our systems meet these requirements with the following commands:

php --version
mysql --version

The output from php --version shows that our systems have PHP 7.4.3, which is greater than PHP 7.4. The output from mysql --version show that our systems have MySQL 8.0.36, which is greater than MySQL 5.7. This means we can proceed.

Next, we need to add some additional PHP modules to our system to let WordPress operate at full functionality. We can install these using the apt command:

sudo apt install php-curl php-xml php-imagick php-mbstring php-zip php-intl

Then restart Apache2 and MySQL:

sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo systemctl restart mysql

Step 2: Download and Extract

The next step is to download and extract the WordPress software, which is downloaded as a tar.gz file. This is a compressed archive file, and is very much like a compressed zip file. Although we only download one file, when we extract it with the tar command, the extraction will result in a new directory that contains multiple files and subdirectories. The general instructions include:

  1. Change to the /var/www/html directory.
  2. Download the latest version of WordPress using the wget program.
  3. Extract the package using the tar program.

Specifically, we do the following on the command line:

cd /var/www/html
sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz

As noted in the WordPress documentation, this will create a directory called wordpress in the same directory. Therefore the full path of your installation will located at /var/www/html/wordpress

Step 3: Create the Database and a User

The WordPress documentation describes how to use phpMyAdmin to create the database and a user for WordPress. phpMyAdmin is a graphical front end to the MySQL relational database that you would access through the browser. We are not going to install that because I like to minimize the software that we install on servers to reduce the server's security exposure. Though you can use phpMyAdmin from a different machine and connect to the server, this is a command line class anyway. Therefore, we are going to create the WordPress database and a database user using the same process we used to create a database and user for our bare bones OPAC. You already know this, but the general instructions are:

  1. Switch to the root Linux user
  2. Login as the MySQL root user

Specifically, we do the following on the command line:

sudo su
mysql -u root

The mysql -u root command places us in the MySQL command prompt. The next general instructions are to:

  1. Create a new user for the WordPress database
  2. Be sure to replace the Xs with a strong password
  3. Create a new database for WordPress
  4. Grant all privileges to the new user for the new database
  5. Examine the output
  6. Exit the MySQL prompt

Specifically, this means the following (be sure to replaces the Xs with a unique and strong password of your own):

create user 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'XXXXXXXXX';
create database wordpress;
grant all privileges on wordpress.* to 'wordpress'@'localhost';
show databases;
\q

Step 4: Set up wp-config.php

When we created our bare bones OPAC, we created a file called login.php that contained the name of the database (e.g., opacdb), the name of the database user (e.g., opacuser), and the user's password. WordPress follows a similar process, but instead of login.php, it uses a file called wp-config.php.

Follow these general steps:

  1. Change to the wordpress directory, if you haven't already.
  2. Copy and rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
  3. Edit the file and add your WordPress database name, user name, and password in the fields for DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD.

This means that we specifically do the following:

cd /var/www/html/wordpress
sudo cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
sudo nano wp-config.php

Using nano, add your database name, user, and password in the appropriate fields, just like we did with our login.php file for our bare bones OPAC.

Additionall, we want to disable FTP uploads to the site. To do that, navigate to the end of the file and add the following line:

define('FS_METHOD','direct');

Step 5: Optional

The WordPress files were installed at /var/www/html/wordpress. This means that your site would be located at a URL like:

http://11.111.111.11/wordpress

If you want to, you can rename your wordpress directory to something else. The WordPress documentation uses blog as an example. But it could be something else, like the name of a fictional library that you might be using WordPress to build a site. If you decide to change it, be sure to keep the name lowercase and one word (no spaces and only alphabetic characters). For example, if I want to change mine to blog, then:

sudo mv /var/www/html/wordpress /var/www/html/blog

Step 6: Change File Ownership

WordPress will need to write to files in the base directory. Assuming your still in your base directory, whether that is /var/www/html/wordpress or /var/www/html/blog or like, run the following command:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress

Step 7: Run the Install Script

The next part of the process takes place in the browser. The location (URL) that you visit in the browser depends on your specific IP address and also includes the directory in /var/www/html that we extracted WordPress to or that you renamed if you followed Step 5. Thus, if my IP address is 11.111.111.11 and I renamed my directory to blog, then I need to visit the following URL:

http://11.111.111.11/blog/wp-admin/install.php

IF I kept the directory named wordpress, then this is the URL that I use:

http://11.111.111.11/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

Finishing installation

From this point forward, the steps to complete the installation are exactly the steps you follow using WordPress's documentation.

Most importantly, you should see a Welcome screen where you enter your site's information. The site Username and Password should not be the same as the username and password you used to create your WordPress database in MySQL. Rather, the username and password you enter here are for WordPress users; i.e., those who will add content and manage the website.

Two things to note:

We have not setup Email on our servers. It's quite complicated to setup an email server correctly and securely, but it wouldn't work well without having a domain name setup anyway. So know that you probably should enter an email when setting up the user account, but it won't work.

Second, when visiting your site, your browser may throw an error. Make sure that the URL is set to http and that it's not trying to access https. Setting up an https site also generally requires a domain name, but we are not doing that here. So if there are any problems accessing your site in the browser, be sure to check that the URL starts off with http.

Conclusion

Congrats on setting up your WordPress library site. It's now time to explore and build a website. Use free themes and free plugins to alter the look of the site, its usability, and its functionality. Try to create a nice looking website. Generally, your goal for the next week is to create an attractive, yet fictional, front entrance for a library website. It's also a break from the command line!