[Pmwiki-users] advanced? features on IIS server?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 11:59:32PM -0800, Robert Williams wrote:
> It appears we are one of the few installations on remote hosted IIS. 
> We're trying to get some additional features turned on, within the 
> constraints of a Win2k box that we don't own (hosted by Tactical systems).
> 
> Page versioning requires a diff like tool.  Same Q.

The Gnuwin32 tools provide diff/patch functionality under windows, the
question then becomes one of being able to execute external binaries on
your webhosting provider.  If it's possible to execute external binaries,
we can probably make this work.

Eventually I'd like to provide a specialized ".zip" file that contains
the diff/patch binary executables for Windows that are already 
pre-configured to run with PmWiki, but I have to check out the licensing
restrictions first.

> Email notification requires a command line mail interface like sendmail. 
>  How do we do this on stock IIS (Yeah I know about cygwin, but it's not 
> our box, remember?)

Actually, email notification (in the mailposts.php script) uses PHP's
built-in mail() function by default-- the call to sendmail is just
provided as an option for sites where mail() doesn't seem to work.  
So, the trick here is to get PHP's mail() function to work properly.  

If you can set $EnableDiag=1 on your host and then send me the results 
of running PmWiki with "?action=phpinfo", I may be able to do it.  
I know that it *is* possible to use PHP's mail() function under IIS, 
I just need to work on some of the configuration details.

If you know the address of an SMTP (email) server that will accept
outgoing mail from your webhost, the fix may be as simple as adding

   ini_set("SMTP","smtp.somewhere.net");

to your local/config.php file.

> Showing nice URI's without the pmwiki.php= stuff requires something IIS 
> doesn't have. (Not sure what.  PM has been working on this.)

I know it can be done under IIS, it's just a matter of getting the
configuration options correct.  IIS, PHP, and even Apache sometimes
don't like to accept anything in the URL after the name of a script,
even though it is a part of the CGI 1.1 specification.  So the trick
is to either get them to allow that, or else find a way to use URL aliases
to coerce the server into doing the right thing.  

Unfortunately, the details depend heavily on the specific configuration
of the webserver and the PHP binaries, and it often seems as though 
every web hosting provider has their own quirky way of doing it.  
I'm in the process of writing a "setup script" that will be able to
configure this automatically for any given installation, but that's a
short ways off yet.


Along these lines, can anyone recommend a good, inexpensive web hosting
provider that is running IIS and PHP?  I'd like to play with setting up
and configuring PmWiki in an IIS-hosted environment so I can provide
better instructions.  Or, if someone could provide me (free) access to 
such an environment for testing purposes, that'd be great.

Pm