WordPress on Windows IIS with Pretty Permalinks

As a Microsoft .NET developer setting up a blog, I’ve used DasBlog and .TEXT (the open source predecessor to Community Server). DasBlog is easy to setup, everything is XML based so there is no database configuration, but it always bothered me that GUIDs were used in permalinks and trackbacks. This made pages get really fugly with GUIDs all over the place. Plus there seemed to be a lack of ongoing support for DasBlog and issues with rendering on Firefox. On the other hand getting .TEXT up and running was incredibly frustrating due to the incomplete and sometimes incorrect documentation available.

Because of my dissatisfaction with both of these .NET blog engines, I decided to give WordPress a try, getting over my irrational resistance to PHP and MySQL. I was a little worried about the fact that I’m using IIS on Windows 2003 Server on a shared hosting service.

I have to say to any Windows-centric person who is reluctant to try installing WordPress: it is simpler than you think and there are only a couple of sticking points that I ran into.

First, there is this great step-by-step animated movie of installing WordPress. This gave me a lot of confidence because it showed that I would not have to deal with a lot of unfamiliar PHP or MySQL.

The only error I ran into was because I had not set index.php as one of the default pages on my IIS site (usually this is index.html or default.aspx). As soon as I added index.php, we were good to go.

Next, I wanted to setup WordPress so that it would use pretty permalinks, instead of using ID numbers in the URL (that’s one of the reason’s I wanted to get away from Das Blog after all). Even though I’ve read that it’s a myth that permalinks need to have keywords in them, pretty permalinks still look a lot friendlier to human readers.

I got stuck at this point because the resources I was finding online indicated that to do this on IIS, I needed to muck around with ISAPI rewriting. I can’t do that in a shared hosting environment, so I was in limbo until I found this link through the WordPress Codex.

It turns out this is all I needed to do to enable pretty permalinks through IIS:

Add these 2 lines to a php.ini file and store that file in your webroot:
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

That was it! After adding that file to the webroot, then I just selected a custom permalink format through the WordPress configuration screen.

Thanks to the people at http://www.cre8d-design.com/ and http://blog.taragana.com/ for posting such useful stuff!

Written by Parker on August 3rd, 2006 with comments disabled.
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