I have since been able to get to a new set of error messages. I still have the old one but I have a new one in addition.
I tried to follow the following advice:
https://apacheguide.org/wordpress.php
Which seems to be what people think solves the issue:
Note: If you get an error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.”, try the following:
Open C:\php\php.ini and make the following changes, and then restart Apache.
Line 647
extension=php_mysql.dll
Line 743
mysql.default_host = localhost
Line 746
mysql.default_user = root
In any case, this only produced the following error:
Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘./php_mysql.dll’ – The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0
So, it seems that it can’t find the extension files. The extension folder in my .ini folder is set up as follows:
extension_dir = “./”
Is this a default? To me it seems like it is saying to look one directory back to find the extension dlls.
In any case, my PHP folder that contains the .ini folder is found in C:\Program Files\PHP. It seems like one directory back just tells PHP to look in program files for the extensions. The extensions are obviously not in that folder.
Any ideas?