CHAPTER 1 • The Anatomy of a WordPress Install 13
After all, with every WordPress release, several security holes are jammed shut, so it is not just
about releasing funky new features for your favorite blogging platform.
Installers such as Fantastico are great and can save time if they do install the most
up-to-date version. If you find one that does use the latest version, you should still do a
little investigating to make sure that other users haven’t reported any serious problems. If
the coast is clear and you really don’t want to do the five-minute manual install, then by
all means go for it.
After having installed WordPress using an installer, you should use the built-in upgrade
feature or perform upgrades manually using FTP should your host not support the
automatic one. Make sure that the installer doesn’t do something strange with the
install that stops you from doing this: You don’t want to be tied to the installer script
for updates.
MOVING THE WORDPRESS INSTALL
TO A DIFFERENT DIRECTORY
Sometimes you want to put your WordPress install in its own folder. This will help avoid
clutter in your web hosting environment by removing all those WordPress files and folders
from the root of your domain, and it will make it easier to manage your various web endeav-
ors. Suppose you want to add other web software installs; you may have a hard time finding
the files you need if they’re all mixed in together (although it helps that everything WordPress
at this level is named wp-something). It gets messy if you want to do anything other than just
use WordPress.
Installing to a subfolder is the same as installing to the root of a domain, so I won’t go into
that. The idea is to have the WordPress install in a subfolder but have the blog being
displayed as if it were in the root folder, while keeping the root folder on the server clean.
You can either install WordPress to the subfolder directly or install it to the root folder
and then move the files to a subfolder. How you decide to tackle it is up to you; both ways
are easy.
The following instructions assume that you have already installed WordPress in your root
folder and now want to move it to a subfolder. For this example, suppose that you have
WordPress installed in the root folder (domain.com) and want it to be in a subfolder called
wpsystem instead, while keeping the actual site in root. This means that when people visit
http://domain.com, they’ll see your WordPress site, but when you log in and manage it,
you’ll be working in the wpsystem folder (or domain.com/wpsystem/wp-admin/, to be
precise).
You should set up permalinks before doing this because you’ll want them to work regardless
of whether you use a subfolder. The permalink options, shown in Figure 1-4, are found under
Settings ➪ Permalinks.