I’ve been working with WordPress since March, learning along the way and have found quite a few things to make the default WordPress install work inside IIS 6.0 and thought I’d share my experiences…
When I installed WP, I choose to do so on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 (that’s what I run my domain servers on). I didn’t want to invest additional time learning a new opperating system on top of configuring a new blog.
WordPress.org is a great source of information for installing wordpress and required backend programs.
What I have running:
Windows Server 2003
IIS 6.0
PHP 5.2.6
MySQL 5.0
I made sure that all the backend programs were installed and functioning before I took on the challenge of getting WordPress to work.
Once the backend programs are installed and working, the instal of WordPress is really easy: follow the scripts, make sure you have the required permissions setup, and all goes really smoothly.
There is a “gotcha”. You need to ensure your php.ini has the correct parameters for MySQL, otherwise, wordpress stops and tells you that you don’t have MySQL setup.
Once I finished the install, looking for a template that I could modify became my next task. I’m using K2 as it is highly customizable.
WordPress 2.5 has a nice gallery feature built in, but decided I needed additional features, I’m using NextGen Gallery for this purpose.
I have my own content (photos and such), needing a means to manage it all, NextGen Gallery does what it is supposed to do.
Other plugins I am using are mainly for search engine optimization, Google intergration, site management, etc.
While loking to cleanup my link structure (permalink), IIS doesn’t have the features that Apache does, however, going through wordpress.org’s permalink page, came across URL Rewriting for WordPress under IIS by Dean Lee.
This is an ISAPI .dll application that so far has worked as advertised in displaying “propper” links (I was having issues with using permalinks, getting page not found errors ).
So far so good, 4 months, 50 posts later, I think I’m getting the hang of it!
