Hopefully you have already resolved it and are happily playing with WordPress on MAMP, but if not, I just started playing with MAMP again today (after not for a couple of years) and had a pretty easy time with it. MAMP has already been installed on my system, but I couldn’t remember how to install WordPress sites on it. This is what worked for me.
After MAMP is running there is an FAQ button at the top that tells you to configure it to port 8888 and that by default, PHP and HTML Pages should be copied into the htdocs folder which is located under /Applications/MAMP.
I downloaded the latest WordPress to my desktop, unzipped it, and renamed the folder to (anything you want) wordpress36. I then dragged the folder into the htdocs folder.
Then I went back into MAMP, went to the PhpMyAdmin section to create a database. Under “Create a new database”, enter a name, and remember it. To keep things easy, it can be named wordpress36. Leave collation as it is and hit “Create”. You’ll see it listed on the left hand side.
With MAMP running, I placed https://localhost:8888/wordpress36/
into the browser. Voila! There’s the WordPress create configuration page. Remember the database name that you just created, because it’s needed here. It asks for 5 things:
– Database name: wordpress36
– Username: root
– Password: root
– Database host: localhost
– Table prefix: wp_
I added / changed the first three, and left the last two as is. Obviously, don’t do this on a live server, but it’s fine for local installs.
I hit the button to create config, (which is always funner when one gets to the “Alright sparky… ” page) which lead to another screen that allowed me to pick an admin name and password, along with entering an email, and WordPress was successfully installed.
Hopefully it’s going okay for you now. It can be frustrating at times, but gets faster as one learns. Btw, it probably took me 5 times longer to write this than it took for me to install WordPress on MAMP. A WordPress install can be manually done on a live server in 5 minutes.