Using WebMatrix to build a WordPress Site 1 of 2

2011-05-23


What is WebMatrix? OK, it is Microsoft WebMatrix. So What is Microsoft WebMatrix then?

If you don’t know please just read the explanation from Microsoft:

WebMatrix is a free web development tool from Microsoft that includes everything you need for website development. Start from open source web applications, built-in web templates or just start writing code yourself. It’s all-inclusive, simple and best of all free. Developing websites has never been easier.

Why we recommended WebMatrix because this tool is not like Microsoft’s other tools such as Visual Studio which is only for Microsoft’s product or platform, WebMatrix is a kind of IDE tool which is not focus on some specified platform. You can use it to build a WordPress site, a Joomla site, a Drupal site and also DotNetNuke and BlogEngine.net web sites. It can get all popular open source system and let you build your site based on them.

Here we try to use Webmatrix to build a WordPress site:

1: Open WebMatrix, and choose “Site From Web Gallery”

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2: Choose “WordPress” and input your Site Name:

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3: If you don’t have a MySQL installed on your computer yet, WebMatrix will ask you to install a MySQL database, we choose it install MySQL on our machine:

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4: Input the administrator’s password for the database (you can see the default user name is root):

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5: Matrix will install WordPress and PHP and also you have to accept EULA:

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6: Matrix will download and install MySQL, PHP and WordPress for you now:

(You can see some information such as : Install PHP for Matrix, install MySQL connector/Net 6.2.3…)

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(Actually when we installed MySQL in this step, we got a stuck in this step, the MySQL installation won’t go ahead, we waited long time and finally we had to cancel the install and went to Windows control panel to uninstall all MySQL stuff which have been installed finished), We don’t know whether it is a bug of WebMatrix or not. After we uninstall, for more install clear, we also rebooted our Windows 7. Fortunately the second installation we passed this step)

7: After the last step installation, We now need to create a database for WordPress. We keep all default setting but input our database passwords:

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In this step you have to input 2 passwords: the first password is for database User name, the User is “wordpressuser” here, the second password is root’s password which you have set in Step 4;

Also, Please DO NOT forget to scroll down on this page, there are 4 more items you’d better fill:

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You can input any string by yourself, or, the better is choosing security key generator from wordpress.org to generate to you.

Then we got another screen to indicate WordPress is installing:

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8: Later we got the following screen which tell us what software installed successfully and what software installed failed:

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We see our MySQL Windows 5.1 still installed failed because security settings. We then check the Installer Log and find help through that Get Help link. Finally we recognized the reason should be that we have installed MySQL in above Step 6, even we have uninstalled, but “only the binaries gets uninstalled from your machine. The database created remains in fact. ”(Please check the files in C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1), and check the similar case from this article;

That means: we do not need to be worried about the MySQL install failed message. our MySQL has already there, it has been installed successfully.

For confirm this, let us to try to run something in MySQL:

Go to start and find MySQL, and run MySQL Command Line Client

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After input database password, please input MySQL command: Show Databases;

You can see our wordpress database has already there:

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OK, our installation part done.