Friday, July 22, 2011

I Just Created a Local Installation of WordPress!

I have given myself a summer project to create a video catalog using WordPress and either the Dublin Core metadata scheme or a subset of the scheme created by Rutgers University for their OpenMIC cataloging software. I'm working with Kinetic Illusions to catalog both their raw video files and their completed project files to describe the raw files based on subject matter, geographic location, time of year, etc and describe which raw files were used in which completed projects.

So one step of the project is to figure out how Kinetic will use the database and what metadata elements are of upmost importance.

As Kinetic is planning to create a WordPress version of their website, and is the software of choice for their web services, and as I saw that Library Technology Reports published the Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System report, I thought creating the catalog using WP would be a good project. Only problem is... I don't do WordPress.

So I'm reading Lisa Sabin-Wilson's WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and the steps are very clear, however she doesn't cover creating a local installation, meaning on my computer, rather than on the web, which is her assumption. So I had to go find software which would recreate the online environment that WordPress requires. Namely I needed a database and a server. As I use a Mac, I discovered MAMP: Mac Apache mySQL PHP. (I don't remember exactly how, I must have googled "wordpress local installation Mac.")

Now, I'm seriously superstitious about getting things to work, so I desperately searched for some step by step instructions for installing said MAMP 1.9.6 and WP 3.2.1. The following youtube video was created using slightly older versions of the software, but it was mostly the same.

I followed these instructions step by step and successfully installed WordPress! Needless to say, much celebration insued as I am not tech architecture savvy, but that's why they created the helpful software. Thanks, local community for sharing your resources and your knowledge!

Now back to the for Dummies book.

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