WordPress Locally On Windows Server

[Jeffro]

This is a pretty article explaining how to use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install

• IIS web server
• SQL Server 2008 Express DB
• .Net Framework
• PHP 5

which is what you need to install WordPress on Windows. Something I haven't seen before or have heard a lot about. It almost seems like a windows version of Fantastico.

http://www.pimpmywordpress.com/wordp...locally-clicks

[Ryan]

Is there any advantage to using that instead of Apache/MySQL?

I use XAMPP. Seems to work fine.

[Ryan]

I should read before posting :P

One of the quickest ways to install WordPress locally was to use the popular XAMPP on Windows machine: but I have discovered a great free tool from Microsoft called Microsoft Web Platform Installer. In just a few clicks the programme lets you download and install all the software that you will need to run WordPress.

So basically it just lets you set it up a little quicker.

I'd rather not be testing on IIS though. I've heard nothing but bad things about it.

[Otto]

IIS is a pretty terrible web server. I'd avoid it for anything used in a production type environment. In my experience, I found it hard to use, hard to configure, and crash-prone.

[curtismchale]

I tried IIS on Windows7 and quickly just switched back to XAMPP. No trouble with it now.

[Jeffro]

Is this recent experience? From what I heard, Microsoft was sponsoring a few of the WordCamps to help promote the fact that PHP and WordPress can run on Windows Servers. I heard that things were getting better. I'm sure they wouldn't be spending money to hype up something that is crash-prone and riddled with bugs, despite them doing it with Vista heh.

IIS is a pretty terrible web server. I'd avoid it for anything used in a production type environment. In my experience, I found it hard to use, hard to configure, and crash-prone.

[dashifen]

I have great success using WordPress on an IIS server. However, it did require some maintenance and the out-of-the-box IIS settings are just crap. Luckily, I work with an extremely competent server administrator who could handle the lion's share of those duties while I could focus on setting up, maintaining, and customizing the WordPress instances.

That being said, the lack of URL re-writing capabilities prior to IIS 7 (with Windows Server 2008) was a big drawback for tools like WordPress. There were some third-party tools to provide URL re-writing to IIS 6 and below, but the aforementioned server admin was always wary about what sort of third-party tools were given the rights to modify the way the web server did it's business (and rightfully so).

Outside of that, however, IIS works though I'd have to say that I prefer Apache when I can get my hands on it.