Setting up WordPress
Well, after much messing around I decided to download and install WordPress 2.5 onto my dev system which consists of MySQL 5.x PHP 5.2.5 and IIS 5 I think, anyway knowing that my web hosts aren’t interested in helping me out with any PHP or MySQL stuff unless I move to a linux hosting account I held out little hope of putting any of this live. But…well it is working and I haven’t changed web hosts (yet). So just to recap what I had to do:
open up a hole in my firewall so that the hosts webserver could come through my firewall and hit my MySQL database. (My firewall lets me specify to only allow this traffic from a specific IP address so it should be safe to do.) This still gave me a WordPress connection error. After checking things were as I thought I managed to get a better error from the PHP engine.
This was: Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server and was caused by my hosts MySQL client being like version 3 or something. Anyhow, not to be outdone I found a suitable workaround by using SET PASSWORD FOR ‘some_user’@'some_host’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘newpwd’);
this allows the old client to connect to the new db server.
Job done – almost. I logged into WordPress Admin, chose options and changed the urls from my local machine to the internet website address. As soon as I did this my cookie was obviously no good to authenticate so I got redirected to the login page…..oh, my password is at work written on a piece of paper by my desk (yes, I should know better, but this was never going to be put live remember) so I did a quick google and found http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2007/05/22/wp-emergency-password-recovery/ where there is a php script that will reset the administrator password for WordPress as long as you can upload the file to the server that is.
So now it really is job done and I can go to sleep now.