All about installing and Configuring WordPress

WordPress is perhaps the best free, open-source blogging script, provided with the ultimate flexibility of using your own server and domain name, without the compulsion to display any credits/links.

WordPress is the most widely used blogging software, powering more than 70 million blogs.

All right Sparky, let’s install WordPress

It must be installed on a web hosting server. For the fastest possible install, I recommend using paid hosting as you simply click on a button (usually in CPanel->Fantastico) to get it running.
The above is the easy way of installing WordPress and having a blog ready in 5 minutes.
If you like to install your blog manually (which is recommended for experienced users), follow the simple steps:

1. Get domain name and hosting
   Hosting providers can be easily found from the wordpress.org website’s recommended list. Most hosting providers will give away a free domain, or you can buy one from name.com, godaddy, bigrock, etc.
2. Access the cPanel or other management utility on your hosting account.
3. Create MySQL database
• Click on MySQL Databases, click Create New Database (name it anything you like, note it down)
• Create a new user and assign all permissions to this user on the previous database. Note the name of user as well.
4. Access the file manager or use FTP.
• Download the latest wordpress installation zip from wordpress.org
• Upload it to your server through the file manager.
• Unzip it in the directory “public_html”, or if you are more experienced and know what you are doing, chose any directory you like.
• IF you used FTP, you’ll need to upload the unzipped files.
5. Go to http://your-domain/ or if you chose a custom directory while extracting, go to that path.
6. Follow the on-screen instructions.
• When asked for MySQL database name and user name, enter what you noted earlier.
• For MySQL server, enter localhost (this will work in 99.9% cases. If not ask your hosting company for this)
• Choose the admin accounts username and password.
• DO NOT CHOOSE “admin” as the username (this makes it easiest to hack into your blog)
• Choose a title for your blog, a description, a valid email, and make sure to tick on make my blog visible on search engines (obviously, if you intend to do so)
7. Go to the settings menu and make sure all settings are according to your preferences.
• Create a Backup User User With Administrative Privilege
  Though not necessary, it is recommended to create a new user so that just in case someone thinking himself to be smart tries to compromise your blog, you can gain it again.
• Change Blog Title & Tag Line (if you didn’t do this earlier)
  Your blog is not “just another wordpress blog”. Make it unique and give it a nice title and tag line, so that people visit it more than a single time. To do that go to Settings -> General and update the information there.
• Disable Option For Anyone To Register
  Unless you want people to register and spam your site, you do not require this feature, go to Settings –> General and uncheck the checkbox next to “Anyone Can Register” and save it.
  If you want to make an interactive blog, with comments, and don’t want to moderate loads of spam, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND using disqus commenting system (don’t worry, it’s all free and takes seconds to setup. Just search for disqus in Plugins->add New->Search)
• Setup your Timezone, Date & Time Format
  On the general settings page, setup the timezone for your country and change the date & time format that you’re most comfortable with (I like dd/mm/yyyy).
• Configure Writing  Settings
  Go to Options –> Writing and configure how you want the write panel to display, and also other options related to converting content and correcting improper HTML in the post to be XHTML valid (recommended if you have a habit of copying html content from other websites).
• Remote Publishing
  If you plan to publish posts from a client like word or any other external editor, you will have to enable remote publishing, without which you will not be able to publish using a external tool or device.
  If you want to blog using email, you can also set that up on this page.
• Add Ping Servers
  Whenever you publish a new post, people will not have dreams of you posting it. Luckily, WordPress allows bloggers to automatically ping loads of services whenever you publish a post.
  In the Settings –> Writing options page you can enter a list of Update services WordPress needs to ping when you write a new post.
  
  
• Setup Reading Options

By default WordPress will show the latest posts on the home page, however you can also show a static page instead of it (recommended if blog is your home page), to change this go to Settings –> Reading and change the default page that should be shown when someone visits your website/blog.

You can also change the number of posts that will be displayed on each page of your blog and the number of posts that should be shown in the RSS feeds.

You can also set whether to show full or partial content in feeds, I suggest you keep it as partial content. (as full content is easy to be scraped by content scrapers)

• Commenting, Trackbacks, Pinging & More

Whenever you write a new post for your blog, your post may include a link to another site. WordPress provides you with an option to automatically notify the other blog in the form of a trackback or pingback.
Similarly, other blogs may link to you and decide to notify your bolg. In this case WordPress has the ability to provide to send you trackbacks & pingbacks.
If you do not want this functionality,  you can go to Settings –> Discussions and disable it.

You can also customize if you want to allow other users to comment on your posts, the criteria for allowing users to comment on your posts and so on.
The avatars displayed for  commentators/you can also be changed on this page.

• Setup Media Options For Images
  Whenever you upload a image to your blog, WordPress will re-size and display it accordingly, if you want to change the size of the thumbnails you can go to Settings –> Media.
• Permalinks
  It is a wonder full feature of WordPress  it allows users to setup how the URL for your blog posts should look like. Optimized permalinks settings are really good for SEO.
  In addition to the available templates, you can also setup custom permalinks by using tags. An exhaustive list can be found on wordpress.org
7. That’s it. Go to Posts->Add new and get rollin!  (You may want to remove the sample post and sample page wordpress includes for testing)