I’ve hit this issue before with another php-based product, but suffered it again yesterday when trying to install WordPress 2.2. What happens is that you set up the wp-config.php file correctly, upload all the files to your webserver, go to the location of the new blog in Firefox, and click on the link to run the install of WordPress. It tries to save install.php to disk, instead of running the install. If you are using Internet Explorer, you get page not found.
Now I really hit a brick wall with this, it took me quite a while to track down the solution. The mistake I made along the way was thinking it might be down to having an old version of PHP4 on my server. I tried installing WordPress 1.5, and that worked fine. The fact it did, and upon further examination both my MySQL and PHP installs were suitable for WordPress 2.0, meant I really couldn’t understand the problem.
I did some further searching for answers, and got a good lead when I looked at my Apache error logs. I found the following:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted
A quick search on how to solve this issue with Firefox this found me the following page that helped me solve it: Tech-Recipes.com I just had to alter the following line in my php.ini file to increase the available memory:
memory_limit = 8M
I upped it from 8 to 16 (it’s on a test server, the suggestion was to try 12). Basically up it slowly and try again until you stop getting the error. This worked, and I could install WordPress 2.2 fine from there.
General pointers:
- If you haven’t got shell access to your hosting, or the error logs/php install, you will need them to look at the php setup for you
- It’s also worth making sure you have the correct permissions and ownerships on the files first
- Apache was set up and running correctly in my case