The random utterances of David Arno

With the new job at Enigma Data Solutions, that I started a few months back, came a laptop. In the past – when I worked at Sussex Downs College – I had a laptop as I did a fair bit of working at home. Despite moving it between networks, I had the college’s intranet page as my home page on the various browsers that I used then (IE and Opera). It worked fine as Sussex Downs intranet can be accessed from off campus (it is password protected as a result). However, Enigma’s intranet isn’t accessible unless one is physically connected to the internal network. This is a minor irritation with IE, as it just gives a page not found error when starting up away from the company network. Firefox (which has replaced Opera as my main browser of choice) has an altogether more annoying habit though. It decides that since it can’t resolve the name “intranet”, I must have suffered temporary amnesia and really I meant “www.intranet.com”. This is a redirect domain for www.aciworldwide.com. I know of no reason to be anti ACI, but I don’t want their page as my home page.

As Enigma’s intranet has a number of handy links that I need access to when away from the office, my first thought was to simply create a static page local to the laptop and have that as my home page. I could then copy those links to this page. Then it occurred to me that, in this day and age, there are much better options: Wikis and content management systems (CMS). As I’m familiar with WordPress, and as it has good CMS features, it seemed the obvious choice.

As I’m running Vista, and as I have a number of years experience with using IIS and little experience of Apache, I figured I’d try to get WordPress running on Vista/ IIS 7. And so began a long and frustrating journey. By the end of it, I’d figured out that it is a relatively simple process – if you know what you are doing in advance. So I’ve written up details of how to install WordPress on IIS 7 and Vista here so that others can avoid the pain I went through.

To help organise the installation process, I’ve split the instructions up over a number of short pages:

Stage 1: Install IIS

Stage 2: Install MySQL & PHP

Stage 3: Configure MySQL and PHP

Stage 4: Configure etc/hosts (Optional)

Stage 5: Configure IIS

Stage 6: Install and run WordPress