New Blog Software Up
Posted on November 12, 2005
8 Comments
Last night I got a wild hair and decided I wanted to see what it would take to get Wordpress up and running in a windows environment (I assume the traditional installation for it is on a *nix with Apache/PHP/mySql). Turns out it needn’t be all that difficult.
Right off the bat I stumbled on to a product with the unlikely name of Wamp. As you might guess, wamp seems to stand for Windows, Apache, mySql, PHP. Probably one of the slickest things I’ve used in quite a while. I fired up a test windows 2000 server virtual machine and installed wamp. 2 minutes later I had a working environment. Pretty nice! So, off to wordpress I went and did a bit of reading. Figured out how to get the db stuff setup and the install for that was done maybe 10 minutes later.
Wow!
I was pretty impressed and how smoothly it all went together. Spent the remainder of the evening messing around with WP and getting a feel for how it does things.
Alas, it really wasn’t meant to be that easy. After all, I already have some sites on my server on IIS/ASP and I’m not in any hurry to replatform them all over to Apache/PHP. So, this morning I began phase 2 of my challenge - get PHP working with IIS instead of apache. Well a bit of reading seemed to indicate that wouldn’t be too tough - php has an isapi critter after all.
Well, 2 hours later I learned the hard truth — do NOT take the PHP windows installer and think it’ll save you any time. Nay, I say. nay! So, I chucked that (i love working with VMs, by the way - chuck the image and start clean again 
) and grabbed the manual install version of the windows php stuff. Waded through the install.txt, manually copied files and did some editing of txt and php files and… 20 minutes later had a working IIS/PHP setup!
Ok, good deal. Now I know how to get it going on win2k server / IIS 5.something or other. Next I try to apply my knowledge to a win2003/IIS6 machine. At first it all seems to be going well. mySql 5.something is fine (crap, reminds me I need to secure phpmyadmin!) and the PHP install goes well. My cobbled together test file shows phpinfo returning data. Ok, set up the db and grab my wordpress setup. And from there it went straight into the ditch. Long story short — WP was giving LOTS of errors about db columns not being allowed to be null. Did some searching on the web and most folks were blaming that on mySql 5 being too new. Well hell, it worked against v5 on my win2k box. ’sup with that? I finally gave up on it though and downgraded to v4 of mySql and… here we are!
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I’m loving WP myself. It does what I tell it too and looks are pretty easy on the eyes as well.
Welcome to the funclub.
Oh, and your Jakarta theme needs sometthing up there in the header bits, under Link1, 2, etc.
Yeah, still sorting out themes. Tossed in a bunch to mess with and thought the theme switcher would be fun to play with. But frankly, right now it’s a p.i.t.a. until I get all the various bits of the various themes working….
Nice setup, I love the theme! I’m running WP against mySQL also and have not run into the NULL db values issue. Let me know how that turns out…
So far, the only draw back I see about WP on IIS is the inability to use the neat mod_rewrite hacks that WP provides. I much prefer leaving the “index.php” out of the URL string.
Not sure if you’re watching the AVs game, but they are getting smoked. I hope they’re able to turn the game around in the second period.
Thanks - I’m having fun with PHP right now (a language I’d never seen until today
) hacking up some stuff to see how it works and what I can get away with.
I tabled the DB thing for now. I’ll stick with 4.1, but I plan to revisit that in a month or so. I just couldn’t have been related to 5 — at least, not directly. I had it working with apache 1.x and mySql 5.x on win2k. Of course, maybe adding win2k3 and/or IIS6 into the mix is what’s mucked it up? But some of the other folks with the same error were on Apache 2. *sigh* I dunno… I just wanted to get ‘er done.
Does the admin portion of WP render properly using Firefox for you? Mine seems broke, almost as if the CSS file is not being used correctly.. BTW, if you want a new app for posting to your blog, check out w.bloggar, http://wbloggar.com/.
That’s odd, but no - for me firefox works just fine in the admin portion.
I have lot’s of stuff broken here, but I can’t blame firefox. I think the issue is more related to not using Apache/PHP. For instance, my “Category” links are fubar, and I sure can’t seem to convice WP that it really wants to send me email when it should! I suspect related to PHP more than WP, per se, but rather maddening.
This thread over in the wp support forums seems to have the key to my MySQL 5.x issues. Tossing it here to remember to check it out later:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/49063