<p>Welcome. WordPress is a very special project to me. Every developer and contributor adds something unique to the mix, and together we create something beautiful that I’m proud to be a part of. Thousands of hours have gone into WordPress, and we’re dedicated to making it better every day. Thank you for making it part of your world.</p>
<li>Unzip the package in an empty directory and upload everything.</li>
<li>Open <spanclass="file"><ahref="wp-admin/install.php">wp-admin/install.php</a></span> in your browser. It will take you through the process to set up a <code>wp-config.php</code> file with your database connection details.
<li>If for some reason this doesn’t work, don’t worry. It doesn’t work on all web hosts. Open up <code>wp-config-sample.php</code> with a text editor like WordPad or similar and fill in your database connection details.</li>
<li>Save the file as <code>wp-config.php</code> and upload it.</li>
<li>Open <spanclass="file"><ahref="wp-admin/install.php">wp-admin/install.php</a></span> in your browser.</li>
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<li>Once the configuration file is set up, the installer will set up the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, double check your <code>wp-config.php</code> file, and try again. If it fails again, please go to the <ahref="http://wordpress.org/support/"title="WordPress support">support forums</a> with as much data as you can gather.</li>
<li><strong>If you did not enter a password, note the password given to you.</strong> If you did not provide a username, it will be <code>admin</code>.</li>
<li>The installer should then send you to the <ahref="wp-login.php">login page</a>. Sign in with the username and password you chose during the installation. If a password was generated for you, you can then click on “Profile” to change the password.</li>
<p>WordPress can <ahref="http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content">import from a number of systems</a>. First you need to get WordPress installed and working as described above, before using <ahref="wp-admin/import.php"title="Import to WordPress">our import tools</a>.</p>
<dd>This is where you’ll find the latest updates and news related to WordPress. Recent WordPress news appears in your administrative dashboard by default.</dd>
<dd>If you’ve looked everywhere and still can’t find an answer, the support forums are very active and have a large community ready to help. To help them help you be sure to use a descriptive thread title and describe your question in as much detail as possible.</dd>
<dd>There is an online chat channel that is used for discussion among people who use WordPress and occasionally support topics. The above wiki page should point you in the right direction. (<ahref="irc://irc.freenode.net/wordpress">irc.freenode.net #wordpress</a>)</dd>
<p>You can post to your WordPress blog with tools like <ahref="http://download.live.com/writer">Windows Live Writer</a>, <ahref="http://illuminex.com/ecto/">Ecto</a>, <ahref="http://bloggar.com/">w.bloggar</a>, <ahref="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio Userland</a> (which means you can use Radio’s email-to-blog feature), <ahref="http://www.newzcrawler.com/">NewzCrawler</a>, and other tools that support the blogging <abbrtitle="application programming interface">API</abbr>s! :) You can read more about <ahref="http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_Support"><abbr>XML</abbr>-<abbr>RPC</abbr> support on the Codex</a>.</p>
<p>You can post from an email client! To set this up go to your “Writing” options screen and fill in the connection details for your secret <abbrtitle="Post Office Protocol version 3">POP3</abbr> account. Then you need to set up <code>wp-mail.php</code> to execute periodically to check the mailbox for new posts. You can do it with <ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron">cron</a>-jobs, or if your host doesn’t support it you can look into the various website-monitoring services, and make them check your <code>wp-mail.php</code><abbrtitle="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</abbr>.</p>
<p>Posting is easy: Any email sent to the address you specify will be posted, with the subject as the title. It is best to keep the address discrete. The script will <em>delete</em> emails that are successfully posted.</p>
<p>We introduced a very flexible roles system in version 2.0. You can <ahref="http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities"title="WordPress roles and capabilities">read more about Roles and Capabilities on the Codex</a>.</p>
<li>If you have any suggestions, ideas, or comments, or if you (gasp!) found a bug, join us in the <ahref="http://wordpress.org/support/">Support Forums</a>.</li>
<li>WordPress has a robust plugin <abbrtitle="application programming interface">API</abbr> that makes extending the code easy. If you are a developer interested in utilizing this, see the <ahref="http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API"title="WordPress plugin API">plugin documentation in the Codex</a>. You shouldn’t modify any of the core code.</li>
<p>WordPress has no multi-million dollar marketing campaign or celebrity sponsors, but we do have something even better—you. If you enjoy WordPress please consider telling a friend, setting it up for someone less knowledgable than yourself, or writing the author of a media article that overlooks us.</p>
<p>WordPress is the official continuation of <ahref="http://cafelog.com/">b2/cafélog</a>, which came from Michel V. The work has been continued by the <ahref="http://wordpress.org/about/">WordPress developers</a>. If you would like to support WordPress, please consider <ahref="http://wordpress.org/donate/"title="Donate to WordPress">donating</a>.</p>
<p>WordPress is free software, and is released under the terms of the <abbrtitle="GNU General Public License">GPL</abbr> version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See <ahref="license.txt">license.txt</a>.</p>
