WordPress for a Dummy

I set up a WordPress based blog on a different domain of mine. I would have been failry easy if my server wasn't so old. The version of MySQL on my server was too old for WordPress so I had to build a new version and run it separately. I had to keep the old MySQL around since it is used by a few other websites on the server. I didn't really know how to run two different versions, but a friend of mine, Ron, helped me get the MySQL server running. To do this we had to force the new version to run using different ports, sockets, log files, etc. Most of this was achieved with simple command line options during invocation. However, once I installed WordPress, I couldn't get it to connect to the database.

First of all, I had to find the right way to tell WordPress which MySQL server to connect to. This was achieved by adding the new port number in the server configuration (e. g. "localhost:12345" instead of just "localhost"). Even once I got this right, WordPress could not connect to the database. After trying many different things, I finally figured out the version of PHP WordPress was using was calling the older MySQL client. For the most part this shouldn't cause a problem except that the password hashing function changed from the older version to the newer one. Once I figured this out it was easy to remedy by resetting the passwords in the new database with the OLD_PASSWORD call to force the older style password hashing.

Now that I have the blog running I'll have to play around with plugins, templates, and other options. Sounds like fun, huh?