WordPress Archives - RuslanY Blog

Azure Web Sites – WordPress plugin update bug fixed

Windows Azure Web Sites has recently been upgraded to a new version. Among all the improvements and bug fixes in the new version there is one change that fixes a known issue with update of WordPress plugins. There have been numerous questions about this problem at the Azure Web Sites forum.

RuslanY.net running on Windows Azure Web Sites

I have not been writing any blog posts for a while. That was because for the past two years I have been busy working in a team that develops the Windows Azure Web Sites – a scalable web hosting platform in Windows Azure.

Now that the Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) is publicly available I decided to try to move my site from private hosting to Windows Azure. My site uses WordPress (with MySql database), PHP 5.3, WinCache object and user cache, URL rewriting and many WordPress plugins. With all these different technologies (many of which are not developed by Microsoft), I thought it would be a good test of how WAWS is capable of running web sites that use open source technologies. Plus I expect that my site will be more reliable and available, comparing to my previous private hosting.

I was pleasantly surprised that the migration from private hosting to WAWS hosting was relatively quick and simple. The site has been running successfully in a Shared compute mode for a while now and none of the site’s functionality has been lost or altered. In this post I’ll explain the steps I took to move my site to WAWS hosting. Hopefully it will be useful to those who are planning to migrate their WordPress based site to WAWS.

Install PHP applications with WebMatrix

Microsoft has recently launched a beta release of a new project called WebMatrix. This is a complete web development stack that can be used to start developing and deploying web sites. One thing that may be not so obvious from all the existing announcements is the fact that WebMatrix has full support for installing, running and publishing PHP applications.

Here are the examples of how WebMatrix can be used to create and publish a PHP web site (using WordPress as a showcase).

Make WordPress faster on IIS with WinCache 1.1

This post used to contain PHP code for object-cache.php file. This code has been removed because it is out of date and has bugs. Instead, the latest version of WinCache Object Cache plugin from wordpress.org should be used.

This post explains how to improve performance of WordPress on Windows by using the WinCache Extension 1.1 – Beta for PHP. You probably already know that just by enabling the WinCache extension and without any code changes it is possible to get a significant increase in WordPress performance – this is described in details in PHP on Windows: The WinCache 1.0 Benchmark. But this can be taken even further by using the user cache API’s available in WinCache 1.1 release.

IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module support in WordPress 2.8

I am pleased to let everyone know that WordPress development community has added a built-in support for IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module in the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release. Starting with version 2.8 the Permalink Settings page will allow you to easily configure “Pretty Permalinks” URL structure when WordPress is running on IIS 7 with URL Rewrite Module v1.1 installed.

Here is how the process of updating Permalinks structure will look like in WordPress 2.8 on IIS 7:

Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module

IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways:

REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0
REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine WordPress.

Note that above mentioned problems do not exist in IIS 6.0 FastCGI Extension, which always has been setting the REQUEST_URI server variable correctly.

The update is available for download from the following locations:

Warning: if your PHP application was coded in a way so that it relied on the REQUEST_URI server variable to contain the requested URL without a query string or to contain the final rewritten URL, then installing this update may break your application. Before applying the update, please make sure that your application does not rely on incorrect behavior of FastCGI module.

Acknowledgements: I want to thank IIS team members (Anil Ruia, Won Yoo, Yamini Jagadeesan) for providing this update and Zend Technologies team (Stanislav Malyshev) for validating the changes in FastCGI module.