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Here is a very specific tutorial on setting up WordPress on Mosso. It will also cover getting and installing WinSCP, which will be used to transfer files from your computer to the Mosso cloud.

This tutorial makes very specific assumptions about your setup and goals, as it is targeted at a very limited audience. If you are not part of the target audience (you will know who you are) these instructions will be of less value.

Let’s get started!

Assumptions

This tutorial assumes that you:

• Are using the Firefox browser.
• Have a Mosso client account (sub-account)
• Have your domains registered at Godaddy.
• Lastly, the Mosso account has your sites already configured in the control panel.

The Cloud

Basically, Mosso uses advanced technology to put together a bunch of server computers and make it look like a single server. They refer to it as “the cloud”, so in this tutorial, instead of “server” I will use the correct terminology “the cloud”.

Install WinSCP

This is the tool that you will use to upload the WordPress installation, as well as any Themes and Plugins that you want to use in conjunction with the WordPress site. If you have already installed WinSCP, you can skip this section.

1. Visit the WinSCP Download Page
2. Select the “Installation package”, it should be the link at the top. You will be prompted on what to do with the file. Select ‘Save’
3. From the Web Browser’s ‘download’ window’ select “open”. If you don’t see the download window, find the “winscp413setup.exe” file, probably on your desktop and double-click it. This will start the installation process.
4. Select “English” for the installer language.
5. Click “Next” until you get to the “Setup Type” menu. Make sure that you select the “Typical Installation” option.
6. Click “Next” to get to the “Initial Settings” menu. Select the “Explorer Like Interface Option” (Figure 1)
   
7. Click “Next”, “Install”, “Finish” (Leaving the “Launch WinSCP” checkbox checked)
8. Setup the login screen as shown in Figure 2. The Host Name is the actual one for the Mosso cloud.
   
9. Click “Save”
10. Click the “Save Password” Checkbox on the next screen. (Yes, I know it’s not recommended, if you want to deal with password issues, you are on your own.)
11. As a test, click the “Login Button”, ensure that the setup you just created is highlighted.
12. You will be presented with the following prompt, Click “Yes” on it.
13. Select “Session->Disconnect” for now.

Point Your domains at the Mosso Cloud

Do these steps for every domain that you want hosted at Mosso.

1. Login to your Godaddy account.
2. Hover over the “Domains” tab near the upper right hand corner of the screen(1) and click “My Domains” (2) from the drop down.
   
3. Click the Checkboxes next to all of the domains that you will be pointing to the Mosso cloud this time around.
4. On the page shown in Figure 5, click the “Name Servers Button”(1), Click the “Custom Name Servers” tab(2), Fill in “Name Server 1? with “DNS1.STABLETRANSIT.COM” and “Name Server 2? with “DNS2.STABLETRANSIT.COM”(3).
5. Click the “OK” button, follow the prompts to complete the transaction.

At some point, after everything is set up, you may want to go through a similar procedure, but select ‘Lock’ instead of ‘Name Servers’ to lock the domains. This sets up the domains so that they cannot be changed without your express permission.

Also note that if you have already locked your domains you will need to unlock them to change the name servers.

At this point, you should be done with Godaddy. You can logout.

Configure Database for the Site using the Mosso Control Panel

WordPress requires a MySQL database in order to function. These steps will configure a site with a database and a database user, which you will use when installing WordPress.

You will use Keepass to store the login information for the database, as well as the login information to the WordPress site itself.

Set up Keepass to Store the Site Information

1. In Keepass, select the category of your choice to store the password information (like “Weblogs”)
2. Click “Add Entry”
   
3. Setup the entry as shown in Figure 7 by filling in the Title, Username, URL, and Notes. The notes field will be filled with the database information WordPress will use to contact the database. You will fill in the values for these fields later, for now, just set them up. The password (filled with dots in Figure 7) is filled in for you by default. This will be the website password. Click the “Gen” button, shown in Figure 7, to create the database user password.
   
4. In the new window, shown in Figure 8, click “Generate”(1). Follow the prompts on the next screen (using mouse input is easiest) and click “OK” on that screen to generate the password. After that, back on the window in Figure 8, click the triple dots(2) to see the password(3), select it and copy it to the clipboard by typing CTL+C. IMPORTANT: DO NOT “ACCEPT” CLICK “CANCEL”, so that you will not replace the original website password.
   
5. Paste the password into the “DB Pass” area you created in the “Notes” section for later by typing CTL+V.
6. Click “Ok” and then the “Save Database” Icon (Figure 9).
   

Setup the Database

1. Login to your Mosso Account
2. Click on the site that you will be working with in the list.
3. Near the bottom, in the “Website Features” section, click “Add New” Next to “Databases”. (Figure 10a)
   
4. On the page shown in Figure 10, give the database a unique name. The character space is limited, so a shortening of the site name ending in “wp” is recommended.
5. Ensure that you have selected “MySQL 5? as the database type and click “Continue”
   
6. Now you will be creating a database user (Figure 11). Type in a database username. For simplicity, make it the same as the database name.
7. Copy the password from Keepass that you generated in the last section for the database password and paste it into the password boxes in the control panel.
   
8. Click “Finish”
9. You should see the new database in a list. Click the new database name to view its details.
10. Copy the database name (including the numbers), the database username (which should be the same as the database name) and the database hostname back into Keepass in the spots in the notes you created for them in the last section.
11. In Keepass, close the “edit entry” dialog by clicking “OK” and save the file once again, as you did in the last section.

Congratulations! You have set up the database for the WordPress installation. You should be finished with the Mosso control panel. We will proceed with installing WordPress itself.

Download WordPress

You should only have to do this step once. Once you have downloaded WordPress, you will upload it again and again for each site you create.

1. Visit the WordPress Download Site
2. Click the download link.
   
3. Select “Open with CompressedFolder” when prompted.
4. In the resultant Compressed Folder View, click “Extract Files”
5. Click “Browse”, navigate to your “My Documents” folder.
6. Click “Make New Folder”
7. Name it “WordPress”
8. Ensure the new folder is selected and click “OK”
9. Click “Next”
10. Leave “Show Extracted Files” checked and click “Finish”
11. You can close the CompressedFolder Window.

Prepare WordPress for Upload

1. In the new window created in the last section, double-click the “wordpress” folder icon.
   
2. Find the “wp-config-sample.php” file and rename it to “wp-config.php” (Basically you’re just removing the ‘-sample’ part. You will only have to do this once.)
3. Double-click on the “wp-config.php” file. Select “Select Program from List” when prompted.
4. Select “Notepad” from the list, ensure that “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is checked and click “OK”
   
5. In notepad, change ‘putyourdbnamehere’ to the database name you saved in Keepass
6. Change ‘usernamehere’ to the database username you saved in Keepass.
7. Change ‘yourpasswordhere’ to the database password you saved in Keepass.
8. Change ‘localhost’ to the database host you saved in Keepass
9. Change ‘put your unique phrase here’ to a completely random string of numbers and letters. You can either just type something random here, or you can use the Keepass generator to generate a random string. It should be at least 50 characters long.
10. Save the file.

Every time that you create a new site, you will have to repeat these steps, replacing the values of ‘DB_NAME’,’DB_USER’, ‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DB_HOST’ and ‘SECRET_KEY’ before you upload the new installation.

Upload WordPress

Note: While working with WinSCP, if you let it idle more than a few minutes, the cloud will disconnect. This is no big deal, just click the “reconnect” button to continue.

1. Start WinSCP and login.
2. Double click on the folder for the site you’re are working with from the list.
3. Double click the “web” folder.
4. In the window with the WordPress files, click “Edit->Select All”
5. Drag all of the WordPress files to the “content” directory in WinSCP, then click “Copy”. (Figure 16)
6. After the upload is complete, in WinSCP, double-click on the content folder. Find the index.html (NOT the index.php) and delete it. There is a toolbar button (a big red X) for this purpose, just select the index.html file and click that button.

Congratulations! You have uploaded the WordPress Installation to the cloud.

Complete the WordPress Installation

1. Navigate to http://site-you-are-working-on.whatever/wp-admin/install.php in your web browser. If you experience problems reaching the site, there is a test URL you can use to reach the site from the Mosso control panel.
2. Fill in the blog name
3. Fill in the email address that you will use with this site.
4. Deselect the “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.” checkbox. You will re-enable it when you are ready.
5. Click “Install WordPress”
6. Copy the generated password to a temporary area.
7. Click the “Login” button, fill in the admin username and admin password you just copied.
8. Click the “Users” link near the upper-right-hand of the page.
9. Add a new user by filling out the “username”, “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Email”, “Website” (you can use the current website). Copy the password you obtained from Keepass for the website user by clicking the triple dots and copy/pasting it into the password fields of the WordPress site.
   
10. Select the Administrator Role for the user.
11. Click “Add User”
12. Click “Log Out” at the upper-right-hand-corner of the page.
13. Login with the new user and password.
14. Click on “Users” again.
15. Click on the checkbox near the “admin” user.
16. Click the “delete” button right above.
17. Select “Attribute all posts and links to: New User”
18. Click “Confirm Deletion”

Congratulations! The WordPress site has been installed. Just a few more steps to upload and configure plugins and themes.

Plugins

Download

You will follow very similar steps to download plugins as you did to download the main wordpress files. I recommend making a “Plugins” Folder under “My DocumentsWordPress”. The same procedure can be used making the “Themes” folder. After you do this, you should have the following Folder Structure:

My DocumentsWordPresswordpress
My DocumentsWordPressPlugins
My DocumentsWordPressThemes

You should download the plugins and themes to their respective folders to keep them organized.

Upload

Again, uploading will be very similar to the main WordPress Upload. The main difference is the target directory will not be “content”, but the “/wp-content/plugins” under “content” folder.

Akismet

Download the New Version of Akismet (2.1.5). Upload it to the cloud in the plugins folder, overwriting the old “akismet” folder.

WordPress Stats

Download WordPress Stats. Upload it to the cloud in the plugins folder.

Configure

Akismet

1. Click on the “Plugins” link in the WordPress administration panel.
2. Click the “Activate” link. Akismet will prompt you for the API Key.
   
3. Click the link and provide your API key. For the limited audience, your API key will be in your keypass file. For others, you can obtain an API key from WordPress.com by creating an account (you do not need to create a blog, just the account)

WordPress Stats

1. Click on the “Activate” link for WordPress Stats. Provide your API key as you did for Akismet.

Upload Theme

Follow the same procedure for downloading and uploading a theme as you did for the plugins, and WordPress itself. Be sure to extract the files to the Themes directory you created on your local computer. Be sure to upload them to the wp-content/themes folder on the Mosso cloud.

Select Theme

In the WordPress administration panel, navigate to “Design->Themes” and simply click on the theme that you uploaded.

Bet you thought you’d never be done!

Well, you aren’t. Don’t you have another site to do? The good news is that you won’t necessarily have to point the domains with the Godaddy control panel, nor will you have to download and install WinSCP again, nor will you have to download the plugins and themes regularly, you’ll just have to repeat the configure/upload/configure cycle for each new site.

Notes on File Permissions

In order to administrate some files through the web interface, themes in particular, the permissions must be set to globally writable. You should set the permissions to globally writable only for the duration of your edits, then reset them when you are done to avoid any possibility of malicious compromise.

In both cases below, you will navigate to the particular theme’s folder and right-click the theme’s folder and select “Properties”

Make Globally Writable

Check the two unchecked boxes (Figure 20). Ensure that the “Set Group, Owner, and Permissions Recursively” checkbox is checked and click “OK”.

Make Globally UNwritable

UNcheck the two boxes indicated in the figure above. Ensure that the “Set Group, Owner, and Permissions Recursively” is checkbox is checked and click “OK”.

Holy Molly, I never thought I’d make one so soon, but it’s true! I’ve created my very first WordPress Widget!

Yeah, well, not exactly. I adapted this Top Commentators Widget from the actual Show Top Commentators (hereto known as STC) plugin by PFA. Here’s actually what happened:

1.Went to Giuk.Net as usual, saw MrBadak talking about his newly installed plugins, and I hopped by.
2.Excitedly surfed into Personal Financial Advice to download the STC plugin.
3.Followed the instructions to the dot, only to find out later that it won’t work if you have Sidebar Widgets activated.
4.Googled for a widgetized version of STC, only to find that the download links don’t work.
5.Desperately needed to install it, so I did the next best thing a desperate grrrl would do — build one.
6.Accidentally sacrificed a few other widgets due to carelessness, but nevermind as I always back-up.
7.Destabilized my site with countless access error messages and loads of SQL warnings.
8.Trying so hard to stay true to the original codes, only to surrender at the last minute and decided to strip down most of the original codes off, therefore FINALLY COMPLETING MY MISSION!
But wait….
Crapazoola. After more googling, I found out that the STC plugin does run on widgets, if you installed the executable PHP for Text widgets first.

My ego is effectively squashed by this new-found knowledge. It took me an embarrassing 8 hours just to get this heck of a plugin to work as a Widget, which goes to show how badly I need to polish up on my PHP.

You may happily use this full-fledged Widget by downloading here:

Download Top Commentators Widget v.1.1

Installation instructions

(WordPress 2.5 and above)

1.Unzip to get the topcommentators_widget.php file.
2.Upload the file into the wp-content/plugins folder.
3.In your WP admin console, go to Plugins and activate Top Commentators Widget.
4.In your WP admin console, go to Design | Widgets and click Add beside the Top Commentators widget.
5.Click Edit on the Top Commentators then scroll down and click Change.
6.Drag the Top Commentators to wherever you want it to be, and click the Save Changes button if you want to stick to the default values.
7.That’s it!
(WordPress 2.3.3 and lower)

1.Unzip to get the topcommentators_widget.php file.
2.Upload the file into the wp-content/plugins folder.
3.In your WP admin console, go to Plugins and activate Top Commentators Widget.
4.In your WP admin console, go to Presentation | Widgets (for WordPress 2.2 and later) or Presentation | Sidebar Widgets (for older WordPress versions), and drag the Top Commentators widget to wherever you want it to be, and click the Save Changes button.
5.Nah, that’s it! Remember to read the FAQ to see what options you can play around in the Top Commentators Widget.
Customization

Please refer to the README file or the WordPress Plugins Directory page for TCW for the latest changelog, available options, snapshots, buglist, etc.

Bug Reports

The comments on this page has been disabled. Please go to the official WordPress.org and post your issues in the Support Forum. Remember to tag your posts as top commentators widget (remember the widget part!).

My Wish-List

» Enable it to do all the things that Show Top Commentators can do. DONE
» Allow the choice of whether Top Commentators should appear everywhere or only on the index page (an idea I got from Andy Beard). DONE
» An option to group commentators by commentor’s name or by e-mail. DONE
» Show only commentors with URLs (an idea I got from Fruity Oaty). DONE
» Link each user to a page that displays all the users’ comments. Scrap this idea.
» Enable gravatars. DONE
» Create a sort of statistics that displays Top commentators for the week, month, year, and all-time. Bleh.
» Allow TCW to be used in more than one sidebar within a blog.

Donate?

Sure, if you want to, though it’s not necessary. Just PayPal any amount to me at freightmasters1@yahoo.com

Making your own widget for WordPress can be a very rewarding, and tiring experience. Though it is an excellent method of marketing your site better than any one of hundreds of advertising agencies who want to spam your wares for a few bucks. Contain your site and blog with web hosting friendly widgets that wont adversely effect your search engine optimization.