Clustered Hosting Wordpress Auto-Installer

[Darren]

As a few of you may have noticed, we've implemented a Wordpress auto-installer for the clustered hosting platform.

Wordpress is a fantastic piece of content management software and makes it easy for anyone to create a fully functioning website. Wordpress also has tens of thousands of freely available themes which can be installed directly from the Wordpress admin area - no downloading and FTPing is required at all.

To get a picture of how quickly you can get up and running with Wordpress, take a look at this 90 second Youtube video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgv78iy4YDU

We'll be taking requests for other auto-installers too in the near future - currently we will be looking to implement Joomla, SMF, PHPBB, some gallery software, and eventually, Magento.

[ridecar2]

I know you have mentioned that you are currently looking into it but a Joomla install would be the icing on an already very delicious cake! One quick question though, would we be able to update Joomla installations through the tool as well?

[Darren]

Hopefully over the next month we'll be able to do these. Wordpress is particularly good because it allows people to update directly from the admin area (unlike a lot of scripts which require some FTPing etc) - so it's very low maintenance; I'm not massively familiar with Joomla from the webmaster perspective but it is planned that we will implement an auto-installer for this over the next month.

[simon831]

Any update on joomla?

[Darren]

Hi Simon, we're not as confident in terms of recommending Joomla, but it is on our list along with Drupal as possibilities.

What we'd like to avoid is the situation with cPanel/Fantastico where users "play" with CMS installations, install and then forget, which leads to outdated installations in people's web space and can lead to your web space being used to send spam etc.

We also like that Wordpress can be upgraded directly from within the admin panel - so there's less effort required on behalf of the user to upgrade leading to less installs left in an outdated state. But as said, we are working on this and it is on our list.

[fairflow]

I've two questions:
1. do you have any advice on migration? I'm moving a couple of wp installations and can set up the files and database but then I presumably won't have the advantage of maintained versions and upgrades
2. can this work on subdomains?

thanks!

[Adam_Smith]

Wordpress can be updated from its own admin panel. The installations you migrate should be able to do this in exactly the same way as the ones we install for you.

The auto installer doesn't work on subdomains which are under a parent 'primary' domain. If you want to use the autoinstaller on a subdomain, you should configure it as a separate site instead.