Admissions Blogs, Wordpress MU and IIS

[Chris Pollock]

Just reading the title is probably enough to frighten you away.

Admissions wants to setup some student blogs. I want to use Wordpress MU. We are a Microsoft campus (insert groan here). Do you know of anyone who has gotten Wordpress MU to work on a Windows server. I've read alot about third part mod_rewrite apps for IIS that "supposedly" might work (but haven't seen any data on Wordpress MU working with them). I'd like to stay away from those plugins if I can.

Here's my options as I see them:
1) Install apache on a windows box currently running IIS and filter off a specific subdomain to hit the apache service. I was playing around with this, but I was having trouble getting PHP to work in both environments.
2) Install apache on a visualized windows server.

Any suggestions (besides dumping Windows Server which is not an option), thoughts, workarounds, urls, resources..

Thanks!

[Michael Fienen]

This might be out of the question, but could be much less headache: get a 3rd party host for it? Alternatively, maybe set up a cheap little Linux box attached to a subdomain? It wouldn't take a ton of horse power, in theory.

[Chris Pollock]

Yeah, I wish this was an option. The CIO is concerned about the fragmentation of technologies and the ability to maintain multiple technologies over time (which in part I DO understand). The network guys don't know apache now, and they don't exactly have the time to learn.

Thanks for the feedback though. If anyone else has any great ideas.. chime in. If not, I'll probably end up doing multiple single installs of Wordpress (standard) which does work fine on IIS.

[Kyle James]

We have all our blogs hosted on Typepad with a professional account, I think it's like $5/month. Personally I love WordPress, but wouldn't want to have to mess with a MU. If you want check them out. blogs.wofford.edu.

As you can see we branded everything as a subdomain without any problem.

[Anthony]

We are running WordPress MU on a Windows Server. I run the tech side of the blogs and WP but our IT guys handled the install. It seemed like it went smoothly for them.

http://blogs.lynn.edu

I'm guessing for number 2 you meant virtualized.

Let me know if there is something you would like me to ask our guy.

[Eric Lightbody]

Hopefully it's ok to resurrect an old post. I'm in the process of researching installing WordPress MU on IIS. We have the same restrictions (no apache, linux, etc....sigh) and I'm curious if anyone here has been successful using IIS mod_rewrite (http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/ModRewrite.html) or a similar solution. To make it even scarier we currently have all of our blogs running using virtual multiblog and I need to bring them over (I imagine I have a very long night coming up shortly) http://striderweb.com/nerdaphernalia/features/virtual-multiblog/

[Anthony]

(I'm on Windows, but on Apache, so I can't speak to IIS.) Regarding the migration part, does Virtual Multiblog let you use standard WordPress export for each blog? If so, you should be ok.

[Eric Lightbody]

I'm just a bit worried about the url change blog.uwgb.edu/inside/index.php/some-post to blog.uwgb.edu/inside/some-post

[Joel Herron]

Have you looked into server 2k8 and IIS 7? IIS 7's built in url rewrite functionality is now at or even a bit better than mod_rewrite. Should be a viable option for windows only shops.