Installing Wordpress

What a complete faff. Have just spent about four hours debugging an install of Wordpress, which should have been the simplest thing ever to install. I eventually got it working (I've promised my partner I'll install it for her to use), but have already moved back to a different engine for myself. Here's what I've been through so far today:

Got hold of the download, installed it as directed (easy so far), it didn't work (PHP code displayed as source, not evaluated); moved install to cgi-bin directory, where it did work (though looked a bit ugly); (predictably) spent an age searching for the perfect theme, downloaded a selection and installed them, discovered they really didn't change much (layout changed slightly, but all looked much like very plain old HTML); spent too long looking on Google for what the problem might be, discovered the install should be outside cgi-bin (a directory which had been conspicuous by its absence from the instructions I'd read), moved it back out, watched it not work (again), eventually found I could set an AddType entry for PHP in my .htaccess file, had some success getting site to render; discovered .htaccess on my server doesn't cascade the AddType entries down for some reason (yes, yes, of course I know it always applies to subdirectories), added lots of .htaccess files (hardlinked to each other mercifully - try that under Windows); discovered that the cgi-bin install directory had been stored by the install process and was now breaking every link by insisting on not looking at its new home, looked into MySQL tools and utilities, dropped all tables, went through installation procedure again (which is indeed quite painless); finally downloaded same themes as before, picked a handful of nice ones, then found one which was also valid XHTML, and ignored an odd page which still came through as raw PHP. And that's without mention of the fact that the Wordpress themes site uses Flash (!) to display screenshot previews of the themes. Presumably they felt the loading ticker and the dynamic window-opening effect were worth the extra three seconds wait. Every single theme.

I had already by this point decided that if this was the "life's too short" option, then I was going right back to Nanoblogger, which I'd managed to get up and running in about twenty minutes from scratch with no problems, and which output valid XHTML, required nothing more complex than Bash (which I'd already built from source just in case, and which was literally three lines of typing), hadn't required me to Google for help endlessly, and had done all of this in the small hours of the morning when the only things you can reliably do is cut and paste commands, delete your work, and stare blearily at the screen in the vain hope that the command which has just failed to work seven times in a row will somehow take pity on you, ignore the incovenient rules its source code has forced upon it, and just damned well work. Gah!

And all this just so that people like you can see what I've been up to! Though I suppose if I weren't going through all this, I might have nothing to say…

Update: And as if all of that wasn't enough, I almost lost this entry, presumably due to not noticing hitting the wrong keys in my editor (see what I mean about tiredness?), and only managed to resurrect it because I'd already previewed the first half of the post in my browser.

Further Update:Although I did point out more than once the painless nature of the WP installation procedure, etc., readers who failed to recall more of this post than just the title and the quantity of spleen being chucked around may, regrettably, have been misled.

The rant should more accurately have been targetted at hard-to-debug Apache/PHP problems, and software which in general uses more complex systems than I feel it needs to. If the webhost's PHP setup had been working, or had been easy to debug, Wordpress could have worked like a charm. If Wordpress hadn't needed to use server-side scripting and an SQL database in the first place, it would still have shone when they didn't work. However, that's sadly the only complaint which I can justifiably level at WP, because other than that it's been really rather nice, if a little populist.

However, I'm not letting it off entirely, because it is still one of that class of programs which have potential to cause more faff than good through excessive dependencies. That's only because PHP and MySQL haven't yet made it onto my list of things I feel aren't excessive, and I don't expect the argument to fly with anybody else, but I'm going to stick with Nanoblogger anyway.