Windows 2003 Installation

Howdy,

Have a thorough read of the ‘Installing WordPress Locally on Windows XP using XAMPP’ in the ‘Installing WordPress Locally’ section of:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Installation_Techniques

Although it mentions XP, this also works with Win 7 and, perish the thought, Vista.

Cheers!
Lyle

Hi Bill,

I have a few questions:

When you said you installed WordPress using the windows installer, did you mean the Microsoft Web Platform Installer? Or do you mean an automated install via your host?

Are you doing this on your own server or on a host? I assume it is not local as you mention your site is down.

As the requirements page on WordPress.org details (Requirements) you need to have php version 5.2.4 or greater and MySQL version 5.0 or greater installed first. Depending on how you are hosted this is either up to your host or you will need to do it yourself.

We must determine that both php and MySQL are working before we can see what is wrong with WordPress. If you believe these are installed, create a file called info.php all it should include is the following line:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Place that in your document root and launch a browser and open the file- http://example.com/info.php

You should see a great deal of information (don’t post it here), but make sure you see it and make sure there is a section for MySQL.

If info.php returns this information, then we can see what is wrong with the WordPress install. Make sure you look at the installation document. (Install Document)

One more point, I use WordPress hosted on Windows. Keep in mind that I am in the minority. It can work and work well. However, if you must stick with Windows, are you stuck on Windows 2003? Switching to Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 will make things much easier. Switching to a traditional LAMP server would be even easier.