stevewilson

review this as it works every time

Sure did. Within a few minutes I had the dashboard.

Many thanks for the tip.

Thanks much for providing those links. Even the link under “If you want to install it yourself” steers us to packaged installations, so it’s time to uninstall everything and use XAMPP or whatever for a do over. XAMPP is mentioned most often in this forum and elsewhere, but this link…
https://www.simplehelp.net/2008/07/18/how-to-install-wordpress-in-windows-vista/
…helpfully walks us through screenshots for BitNami. Anyone have any feel for BitNami vs. XAMPP?

BitNami shows what perhaps any package will ask for — “Hostname” — and the screenshot shows entry of an IP address (192.168.0.102 in the example). For a development desktop machine not exposed to the web, can you advise what I should enter?

I went looking for phpMyAdmin, thinking it part of the PHP download, but find it is a separate application that the docs here tell me “is not the easiest to install in the world, but it is not impossibly hard”. Uh-oh. Yet another layer of complexity.

So, you’re right. The objective is to produce a website, not sink ever deeper into this Apache/PHP/MySQL quagmire. I was unaware of XAMPP until after I had done these downloads and tried to find my way in the dark — a pointless misappropriation of time. If roll your own could be said to confer any advantages, i.e., a better understanding of what’s going on, one would think that by now there would be a detailed, plain language step-by-step instruction to take us every step of the way. I’d be happy to produce it if only I could figure out what I am supposed to do.

Hey, thanks. I’ll try each:

I assume this is a backtick at left
   and the indents will
      survive

Next I’ll quote you saying

copy/paste the text you want to quote, press it again, done. Just like with HTML

which looks good so far.
And I now see the “resolved” option up top, but I’d better not select yet until I’m sure I’m doing this correctly.
Thanks in any event.

Thank you for taking so much time with me, and for your courteous manner. I am now embarrassed for mistaking you for a scold.
This is a second website our group is setting up. The first was built with Dreamweaver with an IIS localhost a few years ago. This time around I wanted us to take advantage of WordPress’ vast capabilities. Hence the strange partners on at least this machine meant only for development and not exposed to the web (unless I’ve done something wrong). We already have a parallel setup at a web host, courtesy of Fantastico, at least to the extent of seeing the Dashboard.
I should look into switching Dreamweaver to Apache, as you suggest, which would simplify. Thanks also for the advice of reading WAMP documentation and for the heads-up about the deeper knowledge I’m likely to need going forward. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, not least because the documentation so heavily uses the field’s terminology as if the reader already knows what he is there to learn.

Whew! A tongue-lashing. I have indeed spent a lot of time learning how to install Apache/PHP/MySQL individually. The problem of Apache not installing as a service presumably stems from having to choose the second of the following options:

(o) for All Users, on Port 80, as a Service — Recommended
(o) only for the Current User, on Port 8080, when started Manually.

and that because Dreamweaver uses IIS, needs port 80 and somewhere I read that a port cannot be shared. So since the auto-service was not set up by the install package, I was trying to find out how to do so.

As for “doing yourself a huge disservice by not pursuing, properly installing, and understanding the relationship between the individual apps and how they interact”, for some of us this is not the be-all and end-all, this being a WordPress forum. I’m anxious to get this thing set up so as to establish a website of which I am the principal editor.

> Ah, well Apache isn’t an ‘application’

Well, yes, but…I’ve so far worked with Dreamweaver, and its installation sure isn’t nested under Intepub and IIS. Hence my puzzlement.

Sure wish I’d known about WAMP before separately and manually setting up Apache/PHP/MySQL. (I’m entirely new to AMP). One residual problem: I can’t find anywhere a script or step-by-step instructions for setting up Apache as an automatic service on boot-up (listening at port 8080). It seems I will have to remember to start Apache manually every time.

Understood. Thank you for advising. It’s puzzling to see an application install within another (Apache) so I thought I’d better ask. (I have a feeling I’ll be back.)