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Guess what? WordPress rocks on Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. Congratulation to Microsoft for the effort. If you didn’t know Microsoft created the FastCGI component to address previous performance issues with PHP on Windows. At the same time Zend worked to make PHP more stable on Windows. The two combined to make reliable and high performance PHP on Windows. FastCGI support is now built in to Windows Server 2008. There is plenty of documentation available for setting everything up manually but let me tell you this, don’t waste your time. Microsoft is really getting serious about PHP on Windows. They have created the Web Platform Installer 2.0 and that’s all you really need. Once you install the Web Platform Installer you can run it and choose to install applications like WordPress and Joomla. The installer checks to see if you have the necessary components, if you don’t then it downloads and installs them. This includes PHP, MySQL, and the application, like WordPress. It also installs an IIS URL ReWrite module so you can have pretty permalinks for your WordPress Blog. For novice or inexperienced Windows server admins I recommend you let the Platform Installer take care of everything for you.

For advanced users I will warn you that, at the time of my last install you could not change the default install path for MySql or PHP. This is easy to get around, just download and install PHP and MySql before you use the Platform Installer for the first time to set up WordPress. The Platform Installer will recognize your installations. Happy Blogging.

Almost forgot, here is how you create 301 redirects on Windows Server 2008 (and server 2003 with IIS6) if you are migrating from an existing site to a CMS platform.

Tags: IIS7, Joomla, MySQL, PHP, windows server 2008, WordPress

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