When in doubt, ask the Internet. I found this video on YouTube. Don’t be put off by the accent – there is an error in the book and he gave me the right answer. I now have my WordPress set up locally on my laptop!
The video is pretty clear, but we are going to do a couple of things a little differently. Maybe watch it through first once before trying to do anything, and then my comments will make more sense. If you have a Mac, just use MAMP instead of WAMP and the Mac file conventions. It should all work exactly the same.
1. He just dumps all the WordPress files into the c:/wamp/www file. The book recommends making a folder for the website, which is what I did. So if your site is named MySite, the WordPress files would go into c:/wamp/www/MySite.
2. He leaves the Table Prefix as wp_, the book recommends changing that for security reasons. Instead of wp_, for a site called MySite maybe you would use ms_.
2. The error in the book which drove me batty was that it said the password for the database should be root. As the video shows, you should just leave it blank. That did the magic for me.
OK, that’s it! Transparency comes at the price of verbosity ;-). Next post, I’ll start talking about WordPress itself.