Call me Fantastico [7]

Meester Fantastico, you feelthy peeg!
— me, in an offensive generic foreigner accent

Okay, it distinctly said “automatic WordPress installation” on the blurb. I know it did. So…go on! WordPress me!

Anybody? Hello?

I have a poke around my new digs. There are some housekeeping files in my root directory. There’s a folder called /www, which I cleverly deduce is the WWW directory. Anything you put in that directory is visible to the whole world, even hidden files. If I were WordPress, that’s where I would be. And I’m not.

Time to sign up to the BlueHost Forums. Hm, okay. It turns out that nifty control panel is called cPanel, and it has an optional add-on tool called Fantastico. Fantastico. Suddenly, I feel like I’m being chatted up in a sleazy bar by a persistent foreigner, “they call me…Fantassssstico.”

Fantastico is a tool for auto-installing software packages to web sites. BlueHost has dozens of scripty things available this way, from guest books to…yes, there it is. WordPress.

Google tells me developers don’t like Fantastico. Hosts often let the packages go out of date, and users too clueless to do their own installs aren’t going to be savvy about doing upgrades, either. As a result, helpdesks have to field calls on old, buggy software that was fixed ages ago.

Yep, according to a thread in the forums, the version of WordPress that our Fantastico installs is a couple of revs old. But somebody suggested using Fantastico to set it up the first time, then immediately downloading the latest WordPress and doing an upgrade. So I did that.

Upgrade was a snap, because I don’t have any content yet so I didn’t have to worry about backups or anything. I just unzipped the new version and overwrote all the old files with new. At a glance, everything seems to work okay.

I have no idea if you have to do something fancy to set up the database or anything else, because Fantastico did all that for me.

Thank you, Fantastico, but now you must go. It would never work out between us. Do not be sad. I am deleting you.

Farewell.