ElmsPark Guides
PageMotor Setup Guide

Installing PageMotor on Bluehost

A plain-English walkthrough. About ten minutes, and you do not need to be technical.

โฑ ~10 minutes ๐Ÿงฐ No coding ๐Ÿ–ฅ Works on any cPanel host
Before you start, have these ready: a hosting account with cPanel (Bluehost in our examples), the PageMotor files (the .zip you downloaded), and the name of your website. That is everything.

Not on Bluehost? Everything in this guide is standard cPanel, so the steps are the same on any cPanel host. The screens may be laid out a little differently, but the names you need, like File Manager and MySQL Databases, are the same. We also have this guide for HostGator and GoDaddy, and a different one for SiteGround (which does not use cPanel).

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1Put PageMotor on your site

  1. In Bluehost, open cPanel and click File Manager.
  2. Open the folder for your site. It is usually public_html, or public_html/yourdomain.com if you have more than one site.
  3. Click Upload, choose your PageMotor .zip, and wait for it to finish.
  4. Back in File Manager, right-click the uploaded zip and choose Extract.
cPanel Tools page showing the Files and Databases sections
cPanel’s Tools page. File Manager is under Files; MySQL® Databases is under Databases. Captured on GoDaddy’s cPanel — apart from your host’s logo and colours, these screens are identical on Bluehost.
cPanel File Manager with public_html open, ready for upload
Navigate to public_html in File Manager, then click Upload to add your PageMotor .zip file.
When it is done you should see pagemotor.php, a lib folder, and a file called config-sample.php sitting in your site folder. (If extracting gave you a single folder called pagemotor instead, open it, select everything inside, choose Move and move it all into your site folder, then delete the empty folder and the zip.) Good. We use that sample file in step 3.

2Create your database

PageMotor keeps your content in a database. Make one in three quick stages.

  1. In cPanel, open MySQL Databases (under the Databases section).
  2. Under Create New Database, type a name like pagemotor and click Create Database.
  3. Scroll to MySQL Users โ†’ Add New User. Pick a username, let the password generator make a strong password, and click Create User. Write the password down now.
  4. Scroll to Add User To Database. Choose your new user and your new database, click Add, then tick ALL PRIVILEGES and Make Changes.
cPanel MySQL Databases page with the Create New Database form
The MySQL® Databases page. Create the database here, then scroll down for Add New User and Add User To Database. (This capture is from GoDaddy, which shows no prefix box — on Bluehost you will see your theaccount_ prefix in front of the name field.)
The one thing nearly everyone misses: cPanel adds your account name to the front of these, on Bluehost and nearly every other cPanel host. A database you typed as pagemotor is saved as something like theaccount_pagemotor, and the user the same way. Copy the full names exactly as cPanel shows them. You will need three things in the next step: the database name, the username, and the password.

3Fill in config.php

This is the file that connects PageMotor to the database you just made.

  1. In File Manager, find config-sample.php next to pagemotor.php.
  2. Right-click it and choose Rename. Rename it to exactly config.php. This rename is the step that switches PageMotor on.
  3. Right-click config.php and choose Edit.
  4. Put your three values into DB_NAME, DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD, using the full prefixed names from step 2. Leave the rest as they are, then Save.

Here is what the database section of your config.php should look like once filled in. Edit the existing lines to match; you are changing three values, not pasting this block in:

// Database connection info:
define('DB_NAME', 'theaccount_pagemotor');   // exact name from cPanel
define('DB_USER', 'theaccount_pmuser');      // exact username from cPanel
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your-strong-password');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');            // correct for Bluehost and most cPanel hosts
define('DB_CHARSET', '');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
define('DB_TABLE_PREFIX', 'pm_');
define('DB_FLAGS', '');
define('PM_HTML_CHARSET', '');
Two things to double-check: the file must be named exactly config.php (not config-sample.php, and not config.php.txt), and it must sit in the same folder as pagemotor.php.

4Finish in your browser

  1. Visit your website. On this first visit PageMotor quietly sets up its content for you.
  2. Now go to yoursite.com/admin/ and create your admin user.
That is it. You are in, and you can start building pages.

If something is not working

Open these only if you hit them. Each one is quick.

I see "HTTP ERROR 500" or a blank white page

most commonAlmost always a config.php problem. Check three things:

The log says "MySQLi Connection Error"

Good news, that means config.php is now working and PageMotor reached the database step. It just could not log in. Re-check, against the exact names cPanel shows:

I changed my PHP version and nothing changed

The PHP version is rarely the cause. A missing or misnamed config.php fails the same way on every version, so changing it makes no difference. Sort the config.php first. PageMotor is happy on modern PHP 8.x.

I cannot find config-sample.php

It ships inside the PageMotor download, right next to pagemotor.php. Two things to check: the files may have landed in a pagemotor subfolder when the zip extracted, in which case move everything in it up into your site folder (see the note in step 1); and if the folder is genuinely empty, the zip did not extract completely, so repeat step 1.

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