Jayson Rowe's Ramblings

Calling all WordPress Experts!

Do you consider yourself a WordPress expert? If so, I could really use your help.

Let me explain my problem, what I have read, and what I have tried.

While I plan to keep my personal blog hosted safely on wordpress.com using my own domain name, I was approached at work about creating a corporate blog based on the WordPress engine. It seemed like a simple enough task to begin with, and I actually thought I would get it knocked out as a quick project in around an hour. I had set up WordPress before on both Debian and Ubuntu and found the process under Linux to be quite easy, but at work I needed to get  PHP, MySQL and IIS6 all working with WordPress. Most of the documentation I found was geared towards Linux installs, and what few Windows guides I came across centered around using WAMP and/or XAMPP, which are still Apache based, and I need IIS6.

Finally, I found this site: http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=6 it was like a god-send! FOR REAL! I used the PHP and MySQL guides from there as well, and got both working really easily. Once I got to the WordPress part, things started getting tricky. For example, the author there wanted me to use these commands to create my “wordpress” database and user in MySQL:

CREATE DATABASE databasename;
CREATE USER ‘wordpressuser’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘userpassword’;
GRANT SELECT , INSERT , UPDATE , DELETE , CREATE , DROP , ALTER ON `wordpress` . * TO ‘wordpressuser’@'localhost’;

Now the first two commands were fine, but that last one did nothing but give me an error. What finally did work was this (found on WordPress.org):

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON databasename.* TO "wordpressusername"@"hostname" -> IDENTIFIED BY "password";

So, that’s the first deviation from the authors instructions.

I was able to follow his next steps pretty cleanly by editing the wp-config.php file and all that kinda jazz, but when he got to configuring IIS, I started deviating again (thinking I knew what I needed in my environment better).

The way he is setting it up is as a site with a virtual-directory, and would be browsed as www.domain.com/wordpress which would be fine for a lot of people, but I needed something like blog.domain.com – so I simply created a site in IIS, set up the PHP stuff under home directory, put the and had the “site” in IIS point to the directory which housed WordPress.

When I browsed too it, I got nothing – a blank white page. Finally I tried an ‘iisreset’ – got a error about ‘out of memory range’ (can’t remember 100% – that was 4 hours ago now). I did some more reading and digging and discovered that apparently WordPress does not like sub-domains, so now, my question is does anyone out there know how to get WordPress set up in IIS6 the way I need it set up? I know I can get WP working, because I went back on my Dev. server and followed his IIS instructions too the letter and was able to get it working as http://localhost/wordpress but that isn’t going to work for me in production.

My question to anyone out there is: Does anyone know how to set up WordPress in IIS6 the way I need it set up? I’d love to heard your feedback and I’d love to have any links to any documentation you might know of.

I hope this all makes sense, but if it doesn’t, feel free to leave a comment with your questions.

Thanks!

*UPDATE*

Is IIS and PHP simply like oil and water? This morning – after doing nothing but sitting all night both PHP implementations (both my dev server and my production server) have simply stopped working. The exact error message is “Invalid access to memory location.” An IIS reset will fix the issue temporarily.

I’ll take any advice I can get!