Everything is Crap » iis

Automated IIS WordPress Installer from Microsoft

paul — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:51:44 +0000

Now that I know how to do it, I'm getting fed up with LAMP as a web platform. I much prefer Windows. (What can I say? I'm a Windows guy!) And I recently stumbled into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It makes installing WordPress embarrassingly simple. Just run the installer and it does everything for you. For instance: I made a website in IIS, then ran the installer and it…

installed PHP,
installed MySQL,
installed WordPress,
and installed a couple other bits and pieces for IIS.

From what I understand, it would have installed IIS if it wasn't already installed. And that's not all it installs either: Joomla, Umbraco, phpBB, DotNetNuke, MS SQL Express, and a lot of others. It's great and, more importantly, it works. With the Web Platform Installer I've gone from barely being able to get WordPress to work on Windows/IIS to stupidly simple installs that take about 5 minutes. Literally! It's great!

Just made me a WordPress blargh

paul — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:26:58 +0000

I've just installed a WordPress blog for the first time. It's running on Windows 2003 and IIS. It was kinda tricky to set up, but now that it's running it's very, very nice!

There's plenty of walkthroughs on how to do this, and here are some links to the ones I used.

Deserialized has the specifics on how to get FastCGI and mod_rewrite working before you proceed with your install of WordPress.

WordPress, of course, has their own set of instructions on how to install WordPress on your own server.

IIS Admin Blog has a lot more specific details about installing WordPress on Windows 2003 and IIS.

I know I'm late to the WordPress party, but I can't wait to start pushing the system to see what it can do. It may become my website building software of choice.

Setup FastCGI on your web server to make PHP sing!

paul — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:09:00 +0000

I was setting up the forums for the Pioneer, which are pretty much done, and I noticed that the forums were acting really sluggishly. It's a phpbb3 forum. I've used them before and they've seemed pretty snappy to me, so I figured our webserver, which recently got moved to a server with less resources (but more hard drive space), was just acting slowly. But I began to wonder if that was really the case. My own pages, written in ASP.net were preforming just fine. So I researched it and apparently there's something called FastCGI that doesn't come pre-installed on 2003, but it greatly increases the response of script interpreters like PHP.

So, I downloaded the FastCGI extension from Microsoft, installed it, then added this hander for PHP files on the website of interest:

C:WINDOWSsystem32inetsrvfcgiext.dll

After that I re-ran the PHP installer and told it to use FastCGI. It worked perfectly. Now my phpbb3 is performing much faster, even though the web server still isn't as powerful as it should be. It works; that's all that matters.

Enabling PHP5 on IIS6

paul — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:28:00 +0000

This is a quick note for me so I don't forget how I did it (if I have to do it again in the future).

PHP5 doesn't automatically enable itself on IIS6. You have to do it by hand for each website you create. The first step, and I'm not positive it's necessary, is to create a new Web Service extension and allow it.

Go into IIS, Local Computer, and right click on Web Service Extensions and choose Add new web service extension. After this choose a descriptive name (like PHP x.x.x) and add php-cgi.exe for "Required files." Click OK. Then allow the new service that you created.

Then, on the website of interest, you have to add the application extension for PHP. Right click on the website and choose properties. Navigate to the Home Directory tab and click the Configuration button. From there, under Application Extensions click the Add button and add the .php extension and the php-cgi.exe to the fields listed. Click OK, click OK and that should do it.

Don't forget to add index.php to your list of default documents for the site.

PHP Notice:

paul — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:25:00 +0000

I got an error when trying to move one of our old PHP sites to the new server:

PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant php – assumed ‘php’ in…

Basically it means that the php ending tag should be ?> and not php?>

Thanks, ClickFire, for the PHP help