Richard Siggs & Network Presence

You’ve bought one of our VPS Plans and asked us to install cPanel (you’ve bought your license for cPanel already from http://buycpanel.com, after we gave you your VPS’ IP Address as soon as you paid) to your new VPS, as per our “Sysadmin As A Service” capability.

We’ve given you your VPS WHM URL (typically http://VPS-Hostname-or-IP-Addr/whm) and the root user’s password so you can login to WHM to start, but you want a WordPress CMS site going ASAP. We understand and here’s how to have that WordPress Site going in less than 5 minutes from there.

Start the Clock now!

a) Create a User Account in the VPS’ WHM via Account Functions -> Create a New Account
and filling in that page with the Sitename (created beforehand on the relevant name servers) and let’s call it ‘Customer-site-name’ and nominate a cPanel Username (let’s call it “cpaneluser”) and set a password for it (use the Password Generator if you like).

This creates the Apache ‘Virtual Host’ for that site name & the above URL and creates all the relevant users/settings for cPanel, FTP, the directories etc. Once this is done you can FTP to the VPS’ IP itself and login as FTP user: cpaneluser with the above passwd, and see the default cPanel User directory tree and FTP content for the website to the ‘www’ directory once logged in by FTP.

b) With the cPanel User created above (cpaneluser) you can login to the cPanel as that user & passwd to perform actions relevant to that site
at the URL: https://VPS-Hostname-or-IP-Addr:2083

In cpaneluser’s cPanel you can setup the Database for WordPress via the “MySQL Databases” link on the user’s cPanel page.

Create a MySQL User for the DB (eg: username: cpaneluser_wpuser) and gave it a MySQL Password and click “Add User”.

Then back on the MySQL Databases page, create a new DB (eg: database: cpaneluser_wpdb) by entering the DB name & click “Create Database”, then go back to the main MySQL Databases page, which now lists our created MySQL User & DB.

Then Add the (MySQL) User to the Database (on the main MySQL Database page, below the Add New User section) by selecting the relevant user & DB and clicking “Add” and giving that user “All Privileges” (on the MySQL Account Maintenance page that comes up from clicking the above “Add” button) and clicking “Make Changes” to add that user to have all privs for that DB.

PS: All this is on WordPress’ site, see http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Using_cPanel

c) To get the WordPress content files onto the site’s ‘www’ directory, download the latest WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download (wordpress-3.2.1.zip) and use any FTP Client software (eg: Filezilla) to upload that zip file to the server (FTP to your VPS’ IP Addr or Hostname as FTP user: cpaneluser with its password set in WHM) into the ‘www’ directory.

d) In the cPanel of the cpaneluser on the VPS, browse to the “File Manager” page & select the uploaded file (wordpress.zip (say) after clicking ‘reload’ to see it listed) and click ‘Extract’ and the default destination directory is fine.

The files in the .zip file are in a directory named ‘wordpress’, which will be created in the ‘www’ (aka ‘public_html’) folder on the server (click ‘reload’ to see changes after unzip if you need to).
You can use ‘select all’ on all files & dirs in the ‘wordpress’ folder in the File Manager and then ‘Move File’ and enter the top level folder name of the web content (/public_html/) to move all those files to the top-level DocumentRoot folder (‘www’ aka ‘/public_html’).

e) Configure the now installed WordPress to know its site name and DB access details, as per: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install

Meaning that in the File Manager we select the file ‘wp-config-sample.php’ and click the ‘copy’ button and enter the destination filename of ‘wp-config.php’, then click ‘reload’ in the File Manager and select the ‘wp-config.php’ file and click the ‘Edit’ button to enter a web-based file editor on the wp-config.php file.

Set the relevant DB ‘defines’ in that file using the Editor, as per below, using the DB info from using cPanel, above:

define('DB_NAME', 'cpaneluser_wpdb');
define('DB_USER', 'cpaneluser_wpuser');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'hereeisapassword');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Just below those DB settings, change the phrase

‘put your unique phrase here’

for the relevant Key / Salt / Auth defines to whatever you’d like.

That’s all the config needed to get to the WordPress Install pages themselves, so click the “Save Changes” button in the file editor page and close the editor.

f) Browse to http://Customer-site-name/wp-admin/install.php to continue the WordPress setup.

Stop the Clock! Easily done (including WordPress download) in under 5 minutes from VPS handover.

I leave it to you from here for that WordPress site’s specific setup, but contact us as a Network Presence customer if you need help inside WordPress itself.