Installing WP on Windows PC

If you grabbed xampp or xampp-lite ( https://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html ) I could help ……

Is there nothing in what you have that starts apache and mysql ?

Thanks for the quick reply. I’d rather not install another php package though, especially as this one already has Apache and MySQL (I think).

For what it’s worth: starting a file called “2K-NT-XP-phpdev_start.bat” in the phpdev root dir brings up a series of DOS windows (I can make out mysql. exe among them, but they vanish pretty fast), resulting in an Apache. exe prompt (Apache/1.3.27 (Win32) PHP/4.2.3 running…). Simultaneously, an HTML index page is opened, with a little introduction (“This is your root directory /www , any files that you wish to view through apache need to go in this directory […]”) and a list of files. I can access PHPMyAdmin from there as well. Does any of this sound familiar/tell you whether I’m able to run WordPress?

Bookmark that html page
Put the wp files into a directory
Copy that directory to the /www
Adjust the url in the html page

See if that does the trick ?

Okay, I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but I did step 2 and 3 before. But now I tried accessing the folder from within that HTML page (the address bar just says “https://localhost/”) and was greeted by a “There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file” message, followed by a nice GUI for editing the config-sample. Now I have the same problem as before: I can create a wordpress database with PHPMyAdmin, but I don’t know which username and password to supply. Any ideas?

I really appreciate your help, thanks again.

Now for that you’ll need some docs…with xampp, it’s ‘root’ and a blank pw ..

Okay, with your input (thanks!) and some quick googling, I think I managed to install it by setting the user to ‘root’ and leaving the password blank. It created the tables and gave me a password to log in, but it looks like WP is a bit confused about its own location now.

Trying to access the login screen from within the installation GUI gives me a 404 (address bar says: “https://localhost/wp-admin/post.php”);

clicking on the index file in C:\phpdev\www\Wordpress-1.2.2 gives me an almost blank page with a line of ",""); ?> at the top and an unstyled list of meta links, among a few other things;

and clicking on the WordPress-1.2.2 dir on the localhost page serves the correct, but unstyled index (“https://localhost/Wordpress-1.2.2/”), with links pointing to the wrong places. For example, the stylesheet is supposed to be imported from “https://localhost/wp-layout.css” according to the source code, and the category link points to “https://localhost/index.php?cat=1”.

Oops?

Yup…

Have you installed at root ? Or did you install into proper directory ?
Have you checked the values of ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’ in the wp_options table ?

If the setup is working correctly, then your blog will work exactly like it does on a webserver.

Yay! Proper directory, yes, but the siteurl was set to https://localhost only, for some reason. I would never have looked there. Works like a charm now, thanks bunches!

Excellent !!!