WordPress is my favorite content management system because it has tons of very nice free themes and also plugins. If you’re willing to spend money, there are also paid plugins which features some powerful features that are not found in free plugins. Nearly all websites that I host for my customers have been converted from plain HTML to WordPress. Now my customers can log in to their own website and post or edit pages without messing with HTML codes and then uploading to website using FTP.

I recently purchased a new local Malaysian webhosting and transferred some domains there. WordPress installation is fairly easy, just create database, configure the wp-config.php and run the installation script. Should take less than 5 minutes to get WordPress running. However, I encountered a very weird problem that is I kept on getting the error below.

'.__('Already Installed').'

'.__('You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.').'
');} switch($step) { case 0: case 1: // in case people are directly linking to this display_header(); ?>

ReadMe documentation at your leisure. Otherwise, just fill in the information below and you\'ll be on your way to using the most extendable and powerful personal publishing platform in the world.'), '../readme.html'); ?>

error) ) wp_die($wpdb->error->get_error_message()); display_header(); // Fill in the data we gathered $weblog_title = isset($_POST['weblog_title']) ? stripslashes($_POST['weblog_title']) : ''; $admin_email = isset($_POST['admin_email']) ? stripslashes($_POST['admin_email']) : ''; $public = isset($_POST['blog_public']) ? (int) $_POST['blog_public'] : 0; // check e-mail address if (empty($admin_email)) { // TODO: poka-yoke die('

'.__("ERROR: you must provide an e-mail address.").'
'); } else if (!is_email($admin_email)) { // TODO: poka-yoke die('

'.__('ERROR: that isn’t a valid e-mail address. E-mail addresses look like: username@example.com').'
'); } $wpdb->show_errors(); $result = wp_install($weblog_title, 'admin', $admin_email, $public); extract($result, EXTR_SKIP); ?>

admin

'.__('Note that password carefully! It is a random password that was generated just for you.').''; ?>

I’ve also tried their Installatron Applications Installer which can automatically install WordPress without manually creating database tables and setting up the wp-config.php file but also getting the same error. I created a support ticket and found out that the solution to fix this WordPress installation problem is VERY simple.


So far I only have experience in cPanel but this server is using Direct Admin. After adding a domain to my Direct Admin control panel, somehow I missed out enabling PHP access for the domain. Here is how to enable PHP access in Direct Admin. If you do not have access to Direct Admin control panel, you can ask the person who is hosting your website or your webhost to do it for you.

1. Login to your Direct Admin control panel.

2. Click the Domain Administration button.

3. A list of domains will appear. Click on the domain that you’re having problems installing WordPress.

4. Check PHP Access and click Save. Now try installing WordPress by running the install.php script. Sometimes a solution can be so simple yet we try so many other confusing methods to try to fix the problem.