I have recently been deploying a few wordpress sites, and I have to say that while I am not really a fan of PHP I love Wordpress. I always thought it was just a blogging tool, but it is so much more, a web site builder, a CMS, an online store, you name it Wordpress can do it, and if it can't there is a plug-in to make it do what you want.
One thing you will find after installing on IIS is that the permalinks do not work, and if you Google this problem you will find all kinds of complex solutions from creating custom 404 error handlers to using URL rewriters like ISAPI Rewrite and changing code in the core files. But guess what, you don't need any of this, the solution is in fact really simple.
On the permalinks page, choose the "custom" option and simply create your desired permalink and DO NOT put a trailing slash, e.g.
/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%
Yep that's it, nothing else required. I have tested this on IIS 6 and IIS 7 with Wordpress 3.0 and 3.0.1, whether earlier versions of Wordpress will work I do not know so don't ask.
The only thing you should need url rewriting for is if you want to remove the index.php from the url and make it even more search engine friendly. If you do need these features with IIS 6 hen use ISAPI REWRITE or APE both of which support Apache Mod_rewrite rules, with IIS 7 Wordpress will generate the required rules for the built in url rewriter and you just paste them into your web.config, so nothing else required.
Nov 6, 2012 at 9:52 AM Hi there
I think this solution only works because you have included the index.php - if you just user the /%postname% it won't work on IIS6.
I think the easiest solution is to find a new web host!
Nov 6, 2012 at 10:29 AM As I said you will to use url rewriting if you want to remove the index.php, but why bother.
If you really must then just ask your host to put you on IIS 7 instead.