My daughter has her own Wordpress.com blog where she posts articles about whatever she finds interesting. A few days back, she asked me if she could have a ISP-hosted WordPress blog, as she now wants have more control over things like themes and plugins etc. Before investing any money into it, I wanted to see just how much interest is there really. As I have a couple of Synology boxes, I thought maybe she should start with a WordPress blog on one of them and practice. If everything works out well, moving the content to another site is not a problem anyway.

With that in mind, I installed WordPress on one of my Synology boxes. It’s not rocket science but still, here is a quick post about the steps involved in case you want to do it.

There are a couple of prerequisites before you install WordPress on a Synology so let’s go through those first, otherwise it just gets annoying. If you don’t already have “Web Station” enabled, you need to enable that first. Go to “Main Menu” and click on “Web Station”. Once that’s enabled, go to “Control Panel”, then to the “Web Services” utility and “Enable Web Station” by ticking the box next to it. Click “Apply” to apply the configuration. Review other options but they’re not required for this installation.

Control Panel - Web Applications

 

Doing so creates the required folder structure on the file system, as shown in the screenshot below:

Synology Web Folder Structure

Next step is to install “MariaDB”, the next prerequisite. Go to “Package Center” again and search for “MariaDB”. A number of packages come up but click on “Install” for MariaDB.

Maria DB Install

If all is well, it should install silently. Now we’re ready to install WordPress. Go to “Package Center” again and this time, search for “WordPress” and once it shows, click on the “Install” button.

Package Center - WordPress

The next screen shows up which requires you to enter your MySQL password. Now if you have changed the default MySQL password on your Synology, enter that password. Otherwise, unfortunately, it’s blank.

Synology - MySQL Password

Click “Next” to continue. The confirmation screen comes up. Click “Apply” to install WordPress.

Wordpress - Confirmation screen

If all has been well so far, it should complete successfully. After install, click on “Open” to go to the initial configuration page or if you want to do it later, the default URL is:

http://<FQDN or IP Address of Synology Box>/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

Initial configuration is pretty straight-forward so I won’t go into that but it’s that famous “five minute installation” that WordPress has. Just choose the right language for yourself, site name, user name and password and you’re done!

I must say that after installing it, I figured that I can also use my other Synology to have a test WordPress install, to play with blog themes, categories and content etc. Very often, we bloggers find ourselves in a situation where you want to try out different options but are afraid of service disruption. Well, if you have a Synology box, install WordPress and develop the blog to your heart’s content. Once happy, roll the changes out to your live blog with confidence and minimal disruption! 🙂