Troubleshooting A WordPress Install

Manually installing WordPress is a pretty simple and straightforward process but sometimes things can go wrong.  Here are some possible problems you can encounter when installing WordPress and ways to fix them.

Problem: Incorrect database name/user name/password.  After creating a database and uploading WordPress to your web server you can usually go straight through the installation process simply by visiting the WordPress directory in your web browser and inputting the requested information, but if something goes wrong (maybe you made a typo or forgot to add the user name prefix many servers add to their database, and database user names) visiting the WordPress directory will no longer take you through the setup process it will simply give you an error message.

Solution: The way you can reenter your information correctly is by going to /wordpress/wp-admin/install.php where “/wordpress” is the instillation directory of your copy of WordPress.

Problem: Post are showing in your content editor but you’re getting 404 errors on the front end. The reason for this is usually broken permalinks caused by a unwritable htaccess file.

Solution: The solution to this problem is to simply change the write permissions for your htaccess file.

Problem: User being asked for FTP credentials when upgrading/installing anything within WordPress.  One way to fix this would be to hard code your FTP credentials into your wp-config file but installing/upgrading anything would still be painfully slow. The best solution for this problem unfortunately is also the most complicated and the average user may require some assistance. The problem is that the user running Apache is not the owner of the WordPress directory.

Solution: The way to fix this is to log-in to your server as the root user via SSH, find out which user is running Apache,  and make that user the owner of the WordPress directory by chowning the directory. More detailed instructions for this process can be found here http://robspencer.net/auto-update-wordpress-without-ftp/

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