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UPDATE: This document is not for Windows Server 2008 please see WordPress and PHP on Windows Server 2008

We have tried a few DotNet blogs and were not completely happy so we have decided to go with WordPress. I will note that Subtext has potential and those of you like us that build sites based on DotNet and MS SQL might want to give that a try if WIMP is not an option. [Download Subtext DotNet Blog]

Another option is to build your own DotNet Blog application from scratch. We started that project but it’s always on the shelf while we keep up with our current customer requests and new design projects. So that leaves us with the option of WordPress on Windows.

Pros: It’s a full featured application with plenty of support articles. It can validate as strict XHTML with the right theme or some minor tweaking. If you want to roll your own using DotNet you have a long way to go just to get 75% of the features that you get in WordPress. It looks, functions, and feels like a commercial application. It’s not difficult to install and performance is quite good using FastCGI on IIS.

Cons: If you are a DotNet website developer then you probably don’t have PHP and MySQL installed on your servers. You might not be comfortable, from a security perspective, running software you are not familiar with on your servers.

Tips:

1. Use FastCGI from Microsoft to increase PHP performance.
2. Use this URL rewrite ISAPI filter to remove index.php from WordPress permalinks

Warnings: The above mentioned ISAPI filter seems to have an issue if your WordPress installation is not in the root.

Update: This is a good IIS 6 mod-rewrite workaround that works even when the blog is in a sub folder. Copy John’s code from that website into a custom 404 file in your blog root. Be sure you use a file extension of php and then map your 404 in IIS to the custom file. Choose URL and not File in the custom errors tab of IIS for the 404.

Tags: FastCGI, ISAPI, Mod-Rewrite, PHP, WordPress

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