Installing WordPress is straightforward. Since we wanted an embedded blog for news on our front page, along with a standard blog in a subdirectory, we had to go through a few extra steps.

Here’s how to reproduce our setup:

Note: The following assumes Apache, PHP, and MySQL are already installed and configured (correctly), which means, amongst other things, Apache is configured to load the PHP module, there’s a database for the WordPress tables to be installed into, and there’s a MySQL user that can access those tables.

• Download WordPress 2.0.3 from http://wordpress.org/download/
• Decompress the downloaded file into the top-level HTML directory; this will create a new directory named wordpress
• Rename the wordpress directory to blog (not strictly necessary, but looks better)
• In the blog directory, copy wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php
• Open wp-config.php in a text editor and follow the directions in the file (this just involves a few settings for MySQL)
• Navigate to http://byCycle.org/blog/wp-admin/install.php and follow the directions
• Assuming Apache, PHP, and MySQL are installed and configured and wp-config.php is correct, the blog is now installed and ready to use at http://byCycle.org/blog/ (Styling the blog to match the rest of the site is left as an exercise)
• To embed WordPress in the home page, first rename the home page to index.php (index.html => index.php)
• Add the following PHP to the top of index.php (before anything else):
  <?php
$cat = 2;
$show_how_many_posts = 2;
require('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

• Determine where the news section will be, probably in something like <div id=”news”><!– News will go here –></div>
• Inside the news div, copy The WordPress Loop; The Loop can be copied from blog/wp-content/themes/default/index.php; it consists of all the stuff inside
  <div class=”narrowcolumn” id=”content”></div> (but not the div tags)
• Modify The Loop; this isn’t strictly necessary, but to use the $cat and $show_how_many_posts variables from above, a few changes need to be made; (instead of pasting our version of the loop here, here is the source; look for the section that starts with <!– Begin Embedded WordPress –>)
• And I think that’s all; let us know if it looks like we left anything out

I should mention that even though PHP is not my favorite language, I think WordPress is pretty cool, and hacking on it is fairly easy.