ThinkTechMD

Well, what we have installed is what the web Platform installer installed as part of the WordPress package.

Are you saying that WordPress’ installer is using out of date distros. Two thoughts with that. First, if this version of WordPress does not support PHP 5.5.34 then why does the installer install the wrong version. As far as I know this is the latest and greatest Web Platform Installer available. Secondly if the PHP version is too old I’d expect the WordPress version to match the PHP version it is installed on. Meaning there is no excuse for a non working install.

The Web Installer for WordPress installed the following components.
IIS Rewrite Module 2
Microsoft Web Deploy 3.5
Microsoft Web Platform Installer 5.0
MySQL Connector Net 6.9.7
MySQL Server 5.1
Windows Cache Extension 1.3 for PHP
Quick Look at the Handler Mappings Enabled PHP55_via_FastCGI path*.php – Enabled -File or Folder Handler(fastCGi Module)
Quick Look at the Handler Mappings Disabled
CGI-exe path *.exe State disabled Handler CGI Mogule.

Keep in mind all these items are configured by Web Platform Installer 5. There should be no additional requirements from my end, if there are they are undocumented steps.

Trust me, I get I can drop IIS and go with a LAMP or WAMP stack, but this is not my goal. I have other resources that use IIS and from a technical perspective this should be doable. Something is just hosed in this new installer that isn’t either setting a permission or a path correctly. I’ve configure WP using an older web platform installer in the past on my 2008r2 host, albeit several versions old, but I had 0 problem with the deployment, which is why I am so frustrated at the moment. I’m getting paid a lot of money to troubleshoot an installer problem. Hey, I am happy– I would think that my customer is second thinking WordPress though. At some point the expense of standing up the solution gets outweighed by another product. DNN is my next go to. I works like a charm, however requires a bit more experience as a developer to take advantage of the full feature set.

If we can’t get past this hurdle I’ll have to redirect them to another solution. My customer refuse to pay for hosting as we have more than enough resources available in-house to include two datacenters. If you already have the equipment and licenses in hand, why would you subscribe to software as a service or switch to a LAMP stack just for WordPress?

My opinion is WordPress has gotten to cozy with hosting providers and the business model is to avoid support for roll your own solutions.

This is incredibly frustrating… Another day wasted on WordPress, this is a total of 4 days now. I’d consider paid for support for WordPress, but not for installation issues. If you can’t get past step one why consider paying for step two. LOL.

It’s been quite a few days.

Well, these forums are just about useless. We submitted a pretty concise issue related to the “5 minute Windows Install”, that clearly does not take into account FASTCGI or how to remediate the failed install because of this broken component.

There are no prerequisites outlining FastCGI as it pertains to WordPress.

Not real impressed with anything WordPress.org has to offer at the moment. Certainly customer support is missing. I mean, one of the most important steps in software evaluation is installation!.

I’ve been quite surprised by the real lack of effort to support WordPress.

At least I know the DotNetNuke install works beautifully.

Time to switch gears I guess. I’ll leave WordPress to those devs that have no background in systems and prefer to subscribe to IaaS through a third party vendor sharing their STACK and hardware amongst a pool of users.

We tried WPEngine during or dev cycle which turned out to be a complete dog, and as such was going to move these WordPress sites in-house on our enterprise network. However, because of the complete lack of documentation of WordPress on IIS aside from the “web Installer Platform” which does not work with Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard. This “5”minute install has turned into 5 days of lost time and effort.

As a result of this lost time I cannot in good conscience recommend WordPress for anyone other than the small businesses that does not have infrastructure to support web hosting. In this case go pony-up for a shared WPENGINE or WordPress.com site. Good luck to you, my experience with WPENGINE has been a joke.

Thank you for your response SwansonPhotos. I read through the post you were kind enough to link.

Are you suggesting we move the newly created WordPress site to our ASP .Net Framwork server, where our client portal lives?

I would still have the issue of calling an external form and displying the related dynamic content from the Client Portal application within the WordPress template?

We want the sites to appear seemless, with shared navigation, header/footer graphics and CSS. I am hopefull we can find a way to resolve the issue without maintaining multiple master/template pages.

Forgive me as I am new to the WordPress/php environment. In Classic ASP we would handle this with an “include”. I am not sure how to handle the same function in php, in particular WordPress.

Thanks,