The hardest part of installing (or upgrading) a Yahoo (or GeoCities) WordPress installation is dealing with the database. Yahoo allows you to create a database administrator, but Yahoo does not give that database administrator the privileges necessary to install or upgrade WordPress.
Note: For upgrades to a blog originally installed via Yahoo's Blog tool. Interestingly, if you first use the Yahoo Blog tool to install WordPress, it creates a database user for that specific install, but does not grant enough privileges to do an upgrade. If you intend to upgrade the blog installed via Yahoo's Blog tool, the trick is to give that database user all the privileges before doing the upgrade. Look in your wp-config.php file to determine that DB_USER and follow the procedures in Step 2, 3, and 4. (Note: It is not necessary to create a Database administrator, but there is no harm in doing so.)
Note: If you have more than one domain, in the Control Panel, under the Home tab, make sure you select the correct domain in the "Select a site" pulldown.
Create the Database Administrator
- Step 1. Login to Yahoo Web Hosting Control Panel; click on Create & Update, MySql Database, Database administrator. Assign a Username and password, click on Submit.
Install phpMyAdmin (Yahoo calls this the admin tool)
- Step 2. Logged in to Yahoo Web Hosting Control panel; click on Create & Update, MySql Database, Install admin tool. In Step 1 of 3, Click on "I agree to these terms" button. In Step 2 of 3, enter a new directory, call it "phpmyadmin", and click on Create Directory, then in the directory list above, click on the Install phpMyAdmin link next to the phpmyadmin directory. Finally in Step 3 of 3, a link to invoke the phpmyadmin program will be presented. The link should be like http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin.
Using phpMyAdmin, set the privileges for the Database administrator
- Step 3. Using Internet Explorer (doesn't seem to work in FireFox), and the phpmyadmin link from Step 2, login using the Database administrator Username and password from Step 1 above.
- Step 4. Click on Databases, click on the 'mysql' database. Click on the 'user' table. Click on Browse to see the contents of the 'user' table. Click on the edit icon for the record where the 'user' field is the Database administrator Username created in Step 1. For all the _priv fields (there's fourteen of those fields) click on the Y (for yes), then click the Go button to save those changes. Now the Database administrator has full privileges to the MySQL databases.
Create a new database
- Step 5. Still logged in to phpMyAdmin and just after saving the record in Step 4, click on link that is next to Server. That link will probably be something like yourdomain.com. In the Create Database field, enter the name of the database that will house your WordPress files. The name can be "wordpress" or "mywpdata" or whatever you like. For Collation select, utf8_unicode_ci. Click on the Create button. Now the database for WordPress is created and ready for the next step.
Install WordPress
- Note: at this point you have all the information necessary to complete your wp-config.php file. The DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD values are what you created in Step 1. The DB_NAME is what you created in Step 5. The DB_HOST is 'mysql'.
- Unrelated Note: Under Create & Update you can find your FTP settings