WSN Classifieds

Microsoft Windows IIS Issues and Tips

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:40:10 GMT

Installation Permissions

In order to install, PHP needs to have write permissions to the directory where you've uploaded autosetup.php. If your IIS host runs PHP in CGI mode then there are no worries, PHP already has permission. On the other hand, if not in CGI mode, PHP's user and your FTP user are different and you'll have to allocate permission. Since FTP chmod commands generally aren't allowed on Windows servers, WSN can't do it for you. You'll need to do it yourself with your hosting control panel.

If you have a cPanel control panel:
1) Click "File Manager"
2) Nvaigate to the folder you're uploading autosetup.php to.
3) Right-click the folder name and select "change permissions" from the context menu.
4) Set read, write and execute permissions to be allowed for everyone (user, group and world).

If you have a Plesk control panel:
1) Go to the "File manager" for the particular domain you are using.
2) Navigate to the folder you're uploading autosetup.php to. On the extreme right is a padlock icon. Click on the icon and the file permissions option will display.
3) Set read, write and execute permissions to be allowed for everyone (user, group and other).

You can also change permissions by using the Windows Remote Desktop Client (RDC):
1) Log on (do not go into the control panel)
2) Click "Start" button
3) Click "Manage Your Server"
4) Click "Manage this Application Server"
5) Navigate to the directory you're uploading autosetup.php to.
6) Click "Action"
7) Click "Permissions"
8) Set read, write and execute permissions to be allowed for everyone.

If you have trouble with these options for setting the permissions, ask your web host to set them for you.

SEO-Friendly URL Rewriting

WSN's search engine friendly URL option uses an .htaccess file which is processed by apache's mod_rewrite module. IIS doesn't come with any sort of rewrite module, but ISAPI Rewrite can add that functionality. If you're on a web host, you'll need to ask your host whether they have ISAPI Rewrite or are willing to install it for you. If you're running your own server, you can purchase and install it yourself.

Please note that you don't need to rewrite URLs -- everything will be fine. Rewriting just provides a minor SEO advantage by incorporating more keywords into URLs.

Other Notes

On IIS, you won't be able to set a unix load level number at which to reject spiders or reject guests. Most people don't use this option anyway.

On Windows, the date formats at Admin -> Settings -> Localization cannot use %e... use %d instead.

Making Permissions Easier: suPHP

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:13:29 GMT

Note: This article is applicable to Linux\Unix environments only, though a Windows expert may be able to discern which if any parts are applicable to that platform.

If you find yourself having to provide FTP information to WSN in order for things to work, or even manually chmoding if the FTP extension isn't available, or unable to change things via FTP after running an autoinstall, this means that PHP is running as a different user from your FTP user. Having your files owned by two different users makes things a pain when you want to access files with the other user. It's workable, but frankly really annoying. Fortunately, there's a better solution.

When you recompile PHP with suPHP enabled, or run PHP as FastCGI, or use any of the other methods now available for having PHP run as your account user, you'll get script-generated files owned by your FTP user. This gets rid of all the conflicts. It allows you to relax and stop thinking about who owns what, forget about CHMODing, and always be able to edit files by FTP. You'll no longer need to give your FTP information to WSN. Also you'll have a more secure setup because things won't have to be set to 666/777 anymore.

You'll probably want to ask your web host about switching to suPHP/FastCGI, and see if they'll take care of it for you. If you go it alone, or you're a web host reading this article, the actual addition of suPHP is easy enough with tools like Web Host Manager (just check the suPHP box on the PHP recompilation page), but after it finishes you'll be left with file ownerships and permissions which are no longer appropriate. The result will be 403 forbidden errors everywhere. For each account on your server, login as root via SSH and go to its public_html directory. There, run these commands:

chown -R accountname:accountname *
(replace accountname with the applicable account name in the above)
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -name '*.php*' -exec chmod 644 {} \;

These may take a while to run.

Normally your web host will handle the process.

Automatic Upgrades

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:08:49 GMT

The front page of your admin panel notifies you of new WSN releases, and also lets you select whether or not you want to let it automatically update itself to the latest stable or unstable release. In most cases, you'll want to leave it set to the default of upgrading to the latest stable release automatically. If you wish to be conservative you can select to apply only critical security updates automatically, and if your web server has trouble with automated updates you can turn them off. If you're still in development mode you may wish to use the unstable updates, which are beta versions between each release.

If your web server has had problems with automated updates for some reason, or you have a careful testing process before applying each release, then you may want to disable the automated updates by selecting to update to "no" new releases. In the event that your web server doesn't support automated updates or you've disabled them, you can still click the update button prompt to get the update.

Automated updates only apply within the same series. In order to jump to a new series, you'll need to press the update button -- and you should probably make a backup first and be prepared to spend a few minutes ensuring everything worked right after a series jump.

If you're having a problem with automated updates, see automated updates troubleshooting

Recommended Hosting Setup

Sat, 19 May 2007 23:30:05 GMT

The easiest way to find out if a host meets the recommendations is to upload the autosetup.php file and visit it -- the area at the top will show whether anything isn't meeting recommendations.

WSN requires PHP 5.2.0+ and MySQL 4.1 or higher (or equivalent fork like MariaDB). In order to take advantage of URL rewriting you need an Apache or litehttpd webserver, which basically means any non-Windows web host. If you're interested in converting attachments to FLV, the host will need to either already have or be willing to do/allow the install of ffmpeg. If you need thumbnail images generated of PDF files, make sure the host is willing to provide ImageMagick.

Try to make sure your host runs PHP and FTP as the same user.

If you have any of those, permissions will be handled automatically for you. If you don't have any of them, you'll have to spend a lot of time setting permissions manually. If you don't know how to find whether you have one of these, just email your host to ask.

The GD library is also important to have for the security image and thumbnails, though virtually everyone will have it since it's bundled with PHP by default these days. If possible, the bundled version of GD is better than the external version since it makes the image_rotate function available.

A few hosts disable both fopen url wrappers and curl, effectively cutting off your server so it can't download files from elsewhere. This will make things harder for you by disabling the automatic upgrade.

Moving an Install

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:16:48 GMT

Moving to a New Web Server or Domain

Suppose you have WSN installed at site1.com and want to move it to site2.com:

If you have a cookie path or cookie domain set at Admin Panel -> Settings -> System Configuration, set to a value that won't include the path/domain you're moving to, you'll need to update these before moving the site. If you forget to do that and find you can't login, you can use tweaks.php to reset the cookie path and domain.
Download a database backup from the old server (though your favorite mechanism, be WSN's Admin Panel -> Maintenance -> Backups or phpmyadmin or cpanel) and then upload it to the new server.
Move all the files (download from the old site, then upload to the new site, then delete the old).
If your database connection information is different on the new server, edit your config.php file to change your old database connection info to the new info that applies on your new host.
WSN should automatically update its config.php to the new location when you visit the site at the new location. If the autodetection of the move fails somehow and you get errors after moving, modify your config.php to update the $dirurl and $uploadpath values, delete the .htaccess file (if present) and resubmit Admin -> Settings -> SEO to get a new one generated.

Moving Within the Server

Suppose you have WSN installed on the base directory of your site, yoursite.com, and you want to move it to yoursite.com/directory:

If you have a cookie path or cookie domain set at Admin Panel -> Settings -> System Configuration, set to a value that won't include the path/domain you're moving to, you'll need to update these before moving the site. If you forget to do that,
Simply move the files in the filesystem (change the directory name... or download from the old location, then upload to the new location, then delete the old).
WSN should automatically update its config.php to the new location when you visit the site at the new location. If the autodetection of the move fails somehow and you get errors after moving, modify your config.php to update the $dirurl and $uploadpath values, delete the .htaccess file (if present) and resubmit Admin -> Settings -> SEO to get a new one generated.

Note that step 1 is important because if you don't change the url setting before moving you'll end up getting redirected to the old location when logging in to your admin panel. Also note that if your install is already in a subdirectory, you can skip the trouble of downloading and uploading by just renaming the directory to the new name you want.

Creating a Copy

The easiest way to make a copy of your site on the same domain is to use Admin Panel -> Miscellaneous -> Clone Utility. If the copy needs to be on a different domain, you can follow the server move directions and simply omit the deletion of the old version.