Setting up PHP on IIS

All you non-techies probably don't want to read this post. But techies may appreciate it.

Setting up PHP and other open source products on Microsoft's webserver, IIS, has always been ... how shall I put it? ... a challenge, you know like trying to climb Mount Everest with two broken legs. So when I saw a link to "Setting up FastCGI for PHP", I was a little sceptical about my chances of success.

When I got to the page I saw that it had a video presentation on how to do it. I watched it and it seemed incredibly simple. I knew it couldn't be that easy. I just knew that when I tried it there would be problems. There was just no way it would work as advertised.

But it did! It WAS that simple. I now have PHP running happily on IIS on my Vista laptop. There was not one hitch, not one problem, not one weird error message, not one gotcha!

I have to say also that the new IIS 7 Manager UI is sooooooo much better than anything I've seen before. I haven't done a lot of web stuff recently, the last IIS I dealt with was 5, so if 6 had this same manager then just switch the 7 for a 6 in my comments. So far, IIS 7 looks like MS finally hit the mark on making it easy to find where things are so you can manage IIS easily.