Install WordPress Multisite Network on Windows Server to use with different domains
What better first post then the lessons learned installing WordPress on Windows Server 2008 R2. The only helpful information I found at all about was at http://www.lauragentry.com/wordpress/?p=517. This post was almost the same as I wanted with the exception of using sub-directories versus sub-domains. The following is the steps I used to get things up and running on a recent install of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard.
Step 1
Download and install PHP from http://windows.php.net/download/. There are few different options. One is the difference between Thread Safe and Non Thread Safe, which I read up on at here. I ended up choosing Non Thread Safe for the sake of speed. There is also a VC9 (Visual Studio 2008) version and a VC6 (Visual Studio 6) version. I saw no reason not to us the VC9 version. There is also supposed to be a x64 version, but at the time I was doing this it was no where to be found, so I went ahead and installed the x86 version with no issues.
Step 2
Download and install MySQL Community Server from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. I installed the 64-bit version using the MSI installer.
Step 3
Add a database and a user to MySQL
- Open up command prompt
- Run
mysql -uroot -p - Enter the password you created during setup and then you should see a
mysql>prompt - Type
create database wordpressdb;and press enter (You can rename wordpressdb to something else if you'd like. - Type
create user 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';and press enter (Replace wordpressuser and password with whatever you'd like) - Type
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpressdb.* to 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;and press enter
Step 4
Download, extract and basic configure WordPress (Instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress)
Step 5
Follow the directions at http://www.lauragentry.com/wordpress/?p=517 with the expection of skipping the second half of STEP 2 that tells you to change 'SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL' to false (Leave it at true). Also don't miss the part about installing UrlRewrite module, otherwise you'll just see the 500 Internal Server Error.
Step 6
Actually creating blogs using different domains is where I really started to run into trouble and why I'm writing this blog post. One of the keys I learned is that all the admin logins have to be subdomains of a single domain (e.g. user1.domain.com/wp-admin and user2.domain.com/wp-admin). Make sure and add each subdomain to your IIS WordPress site if you don't have it as the default site.
Step 7
Install the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin manuall. This will then allow you to set different domains for each blog site, so that instead of user1.domain.com you can use something like blog.userdomain.com.