Well I don’t know what caused this all to start, but whatever it was, it caused me a whole lot of trouble.

First, I couldn’t get the blog to show up. So I just restarted IIS and tried again. It didn’t work. So I restarted the server… Still nothing. Then I had an idea. I checked my home page and confirmed that something was wrong with my PHP installation. So I tried reinstalling it. I still couldn’t get it to work. For some reason it’s not easy to get PHP installed on an IIS server. I uninstalled and reinstalled PHP several times before deciding that this method wouldn’t work.

Then, I thought, if I can somehow get Apache installed on this server it would probably save me a lot of trouble. The only problem was that I’ve never been able to successfully install Apache on a Windows system — or on any system for that matter. I tried testing it on my computer. The first couple times I tried it didn’t really install. It would install the Apache Monitor, but no services would be installed. So I Googled it. I never really found the real reason why no services would install, but eventually I found a guide to installing Apache, and it gave me a different download site than the one I had been using. It was still Apache’s website, just a different page, with a list of a couple different versions.

After that, I installed Apache on my server, successfully, setup the default directory and default documents and it worked. Then I had to install PHP. I uninstalled the PHP that was already on there. Got rid of all the files, and then reinstalled it for an Apache server. Once I setup the extensions directory and added all the extensions it worked.

WordPress worked right away. I was very happy. Some of my other PHP scripts still don’t work yet. Like PHP weather, and Gallery2. It doesn’t really matter though, becuase PHP weather didn’t work right before anyway, so maybe now I’ll get it working properly. And I still have all the pictures that were in my gallery, and I still have the theme that I was using, so all I have to do is reinstall the Gallery and put the photos back in and put the theme back on there. It shouldn’t take too long.

Overall I’m not really mad that this happend. Other than the two hours or so of down time of course. But I finally got Apache installed and that will really help me a lot. If anybody knows what the download site I was talking about is, please post it on here. If anybody needs it, and nobody else has posted it yet, I could probably find it again.

Tags: Apache, PHP