WordPress MU

I know this has been asked many times - but I have not seen a single definitive answer. Will WordPressMU work on a windows box using IIS6?

If not out of the box then with an IIS version of mod_rewrite installed?

Or will I be wasting my time even trying?

What confuses me is that on the download page it says "The zip format is great for Windows and OS X platforms" - which implies that it will work, but then the requirements say " * Apache mod_rewrite - if you had WP installed already with fancy URLs then you should be fine.
* Apache FollowSymlinks must be switched on. This will disappear in later releases."

Could not find a definitive statement on the site to say one way or the other!

I don't have an answer for you main question as I don't use IIS over here but the two downloads are the same. It's just the compression is different. Zip is mostly found on the windows platform but rarely on linux. *.gz support is found commonly on linux but rarely on windows. There's no difference between the files contained within though.

Donncha's probably trying to shortstep the "Which version do I download" questions.

Hope this at least gets you started.
-drmike

Thanks for taking the time to respond Mike. I am guessing that the developers won't be along to answer this (else they would have put the info on the main site) and as you don't know the answer I think I may as well give this up before I waste more time on it!

Anybody know of other blog software which does the same thing in IIS :)

Not really. We have discussed IIS though in the past. Have you searched the forums and/or Google?

Donncha does pop in on occasion though.

I read perhaps a dozen or so threads re: IIS and there only seemed to be responses along the lines of either a) Don't use Windows, or b) Using an IIS mod_rewrite equivalent may work.

Unless I missed something I did not see a single 'official' statement saying it won't work (maybe that is because it could, technically, be _made_ to work?) or a conclusive 'I got it to work' statement :(

I saw that Donncha pops in, but went to his profile and looked through all the posts made in the last 12 months - nothing relating to IIS on Windows - again, apologies if I missed it.

It must frustrate you to answer the same question so frequently - an addition to the FAQ would be most helpful :)

Again, thanks.

Well, the download page does say it requires apache.

I do remember a thread where someone said they kinda had it running on IIS, but never provided any details.

Since Apache is available, and for free, why even consider using IIS at all? It's pretty inferior. Then again, Windows as a web server isn't exactly the most efficient thing either.

/Me Personally...

"F" IIS, Windows, MS, and William Gates. And his cat, too.

I just hated them before, but after the last 2 days of having to deal with their "support"... It makes me soooo glad I send my money to Steve Jobs & Co.

Needless to say, after the last 2 days, I'm extremely bitter. How companies can interact with callers like they interacted with me, and stay in business, I'll never figure out. If I did that, I'd lose all my clients.

I haven't had a windows server since 95-96 myself.

I do wish I could help.

Why don't you just install Apache on your Windows server? Go get WAMP. If you just aren't familiar with Apache, don't worry. It's easy to admin (less complicated than IIS in my opinion). Just a config file on a simple server setup.

Also, there are tons of modules you can install to do wicked-awesome things that IIS doesn't even come close to (mod_rewrite is one, and probably one of the most wicked-awesome).

Also, if you have asp apps running on the server, you can run them on apache as well. It's a win-win :)

Ben

mmm - i may do that but it includes PHP and MySQL which I already have - it's only the Apache that I need. Can that be installed on it's own - just to be used for WordPress and without changing / breaking anything else on my server?

Also, if the .htaccess file is created during installation does it matter at that point that Apache mod_rewrite is not there? Or does it create the file regardless?

- Yes, Apache can be installed on it's own. There should be a download for it on the apache.org website for the windows version. Ben was probably suggesting WAMP since it's an all-in-one package and already configured to work together.

- Haven't tried it without it. The blogs are defaulted though to assume that mod_rewrite is there and to create and use permalinks right from the start though. If it's a really big issue, you could probably change the settings within wp-admin/upgrade-schema.php to just use the numerical URLs and then run the setup. Subdomains may be an issue though as well.

Good question actually. Hasn't been asked before.

Yes, I was just trying to keep it simple for a person new to Apache. Apache alone installs easily on Windows.

If you are talking about running both IIS and Apache at the same time, though, one of the two will need to listen to a different IP or a different port on the same IP (both will listen to port 80 by default). This is easily changed in the config file for apache.

These may help:

http://codex.wordpress.org/User:ringmaster/IIS

http://cornwall.backtalk.com/archives/2004/07/07/15/16/31/