Welcome to my shiny new site powered by WordPress. The first time I tried to install WordPress it involved uploading it from my computer to my host. With the generous helping of 32kb/s upload speed that is Australian internet, this proved to be exceedingly slow and I ended up stuffing something up anyway.

This time round I decided to exploit the SSH ability of Nearly Free Speech Hosting and nerd it up a bit.

Installing WordPress using SVN

Instead of uploading using FTP I used SVN (Subversion) and checked out straight from the WordPress SVN server. here’s my version of this tutorial from the WordPress codex could be better or worse, you decide:

1. Log into your host using SSH. You can use the Terminal if you’re on Linux or Mac (Applications>Utilities>Terminal). If you’re on Windows download a program called PuTTY.
2. Make sure you’re in your home web directory, it should be where you are right now.
3. Checkout the latest STABLE version. Currently 2.9.2

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2 .

4. Now you need to edit wp-config-sample.php. If you know your way around Terminal based editors then use that. Otherwise you can use FTP software (I use Fetch for Mac, WinSCP for Windows), and edit using that.
5. Follow the rest of the Installing WordPress instructions.
6. Success!

Installing Plugins and Extensions using wget

Now everything’s set up you’re going to want to install themes and plugins. Once again rather than using FTP or giving WordPress your login credentials, we can do this nice and quickly in the terminal.

1. find the plugin/theme you want and copy the link address by right clicking on download and “Copy Link Address”

2. Back in the terminal navigate to the plugin (or themes) directory

cd wp-content
cd plugins

3. Using wget we can download the plugin .zip file

wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/stats.1.6.2.zip

4. Now we can unzip the file and it should extract into a folder.

unzip stats.1.6.2.zip

If you’re unsure of whether or not it will unzip into a directory you can check using unzip -l first.

unzip -l stats.1.6.2.zip

5. now the plugin should be in your wordpress admin plugin manager. Let’s just delete the zip file to save some space.

rm stats.1.6.2.zip

6. activate the plugin in wordpress admin and start using it!

And there we go. The advantage of having your WordPress installed using svn is that upgrading versions is a simple as typing in
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2/ .
I also find that this process is a lot faster for downloading and uploading plugins and themes. Hope this helped.