Installing WordPress on Windows

I am having the same issues with the latest builds on a Windows server. I posted a message in the Beta discussion, hoping we can get some solid answers on what needs to happen for full Windows compatibility.

Can’t help you with your problems but I can tell you I am running WP off my home computer running Windows (W2K) and Apache server with domain forwarding by MapName (formally DewDesigns) with nary a hitch.

I have tried a variety of PHP Blog scripts with essentially the same difficulties. I believe the problems I have had are related to the mod_rewrite on Apache servers. The web server I am using doesn’t support that which is why I get WP installed and partly working. Apparently mod_rewrite does some sort of page forwarding hence I get redirected which causes the page not found or server not found errors. If there were a way to toggle off mod_rewrite then WP might work without a hitch. Is this possible as I believe I saw in some of the install docs that mod_rewrite was optional? Since I ran into this problem I’ve checked out other Blog scripts and WP is by far the best one I’ve seen. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Straight out of the box WP does not use mod_rewrite. I would suggest not installing the alpha version. Install the latest stable build – you can upgrade later when things are running properly.

I started with the “Blakely” zip but just could not get anything to work with that. I read on the site that the problems I experienced with that particular build were somewhat resolved with one of the nightly builds – 04/15/2004. Starting with that build I have managed to install WP but with all of the caveats mentioned in my first posting. I just tangoed with 04/20/2004 with pretty much the same results. I can set up WP such as it is and provide a URL to the site if that will help. https://www.tomarie.tzo.com/wordpress

At long last I resolved the problem I encountered with WordPress and my particular system. I am using a web server called ProtoNova https://www.slproweb.com/ which currently runs on Windows OS. Note that the author is currently working to port this and other software to Linux. At any rate WordPress seemed to identify ProtoNova as IIS which it is not. I tested commenting out the following code in wp-settings // Fix for IIS, which doesn't set REQUEST_URI
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = ( isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ? $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] : $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] . (( isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) ? '?' . $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] : '')));
After commenting out the above code WordPress seems to be working without a hitch. If there is a better way to do this, please advise. I don’t know the criteria which WordPress uses to determine the kind of server on whihc it runs but I’m sure there is a better way to set this information than what I’ve done here.

PHP 4.3.5 was a very problematic PHP version and was quickly superseeded by 4.3.6 to get rid of the issues that it had. I’d look into that as a problem – one of the largest issues was its inability to load many modules when running on Windows. I’m not sure if this has relevence to the issues you are experiencing but either way a quick upgrade might be a good idea.

Actually, I had to resort to modifying several of the PHP scripts in WordPress, essentially making use of the siteurl variable as a means to eliminate the 404’s I was getting. For whatever reason some pages worked without a hitch while others failed to load the proper page whenever I clicked on a certain function, say, update changed options, etc. Apparently some server variables were either blank or not providing the information the WP scripts expected. I am using a little known web server, ProtoNova and host from my home computer network so I should have expected to have to make changes accordingly. I will, however, look into the newer version of PHP.