When I installed WordPress on visual77.com, I used the Fantastico installer, and it worked perfectly. Plugins can be automatically installed, all of my plugins work fine, uploading is great, the whole nine yards. At my day job, I’ve had to set up a few WordPress blogs, without the benefit of Fantastico, and I can never get the install working correctly. This most recent install takes the cake for pain in the ass. I tried using Plesk’s installer (fuck Plesk, by the way, I hate that system), and here was the sequence of events…

1. Use Plesk installer to install WordPress 2.0… 2.7 is the most recent stable, so this version is pretty old, and really ugly. I log into wp-admin okay, but get permission issues on any other page.
2. Do a manual upgrade to 2.7. This seems to go smooth, but now I can’t log in, it seems to accept my credentials, but deny all page requests.
3. Find out where it is checking permission, bypass that function to give permission to anyone on any request.
4. Go to the user editing to change my role to Administrator. There are no roles. The dropdown is blank.
5. Sift through code, finding how that dropdown is populated. Find out it’s looking for an entry in the options table called ‘user_roles’, without a prefix, because this install doesn’t use a prefix.
6. Go to the database and find an option called ‘wp_user_roles’. Upon install, Plesk fucked this name up. Change the name to just ‘user_roles’.
7. Remove my permission bypass and log in again successfully.
8. Attempt to install a new plugin, but instead of the automatic install visual77.com does, it asks for FTP credentials. I don’t know why visual77.com doesn’t need FTP credentials for installing a WordPress plugin, but once I find out, I’ll write about it. I just use FTP instead.
9. Install Sociable plugin for WordPress, attempt to save the options, and get this error…
   POST to /wp-admin/options-general.php not supported.

This is where I am currently at – stalled while fighting Sociable. I’ll write more once I have a solution. I looked around the web and couldn’t find one.

WordPress is fantastic when all goes smoothly, but it seems to die ungracefully. It is a fickle system that is only good when it all goes well. If it wasn’t for visual77.com, I’d hate WordPress, but the install here went perfect, and now I really like it. They just need to get better at letting you know what is wrong and how to correct it.