briesmith

@ esmi I don’t intend to write plug-ins so PHP is an irrelevance to me.

@ Seacost Web Design You’ve missed the point; I am the host. And you confirm what I said in my very first post “Any assertion of the existence of a 5 minute install needs to be severely caveated with the warning that this only applies when installing on a commercial host which has done all the preparatory work.”

I’d add that statements like, “differentiate the use of web.config vs. .htaccess and file permissions” are just completely unhelpful. I know it’s English and I know what each word means individually but as a statement what on Earth does it mean?

It’s absolutely typical of so much that gets posted here in that it shows a total lack of understanding of how to explain something. It makes every mistake a technical writer can make. No context – the old who, what, why and where stuff. It assumes a level of understanding in the reader that probably doesn’t exist and it provides no referential information; how to find what is being talked about, how to do what is being talked about and how to check when done that it has been done correctly.

I know you meant well and like any poster on any forum, I am grateful for any and every attempt to help me but I think we all need a short 101 in how to write technical help narrative.

Why it is doing this I do not know, a few comments on www says it could be related to PHP, but nothing concrete. My plan is to
• remove PHP, MySQL and WordPress
• remove ASP website
• uninstall IIS
• Reboot server
• reinstall IIS and test
• reinstall ASP website and test
• reinstall PHP, MySQL etc and test
• reinstall WordPress and test

At the moment we do not know what (if any) changes installing PHP, MySQL and WordPress has made to IIS, so starting from a clean sheet is probably the best option.

But it’s a lot of work and I could find myself back exactly where I started. This just bears out my point that talk of a 5 minute (to say nothing of 3) install is just pie in the sky nonsense.

It shouldn’t be this hard; diagnostics should have been developed by now. After all, all the products are mature and must have been installed in the combination I am installing them 1,000s of times.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

As for why am I doing this; it’s to take advantage of the speed increases technology like BT’s Infinity here in the UK provides and to get away from the expensive and consistently poor and unreliable performance most UK ISPs – all those I’ve tried anyway – provide.

There’s no reason not to use WordPress – I prefer it to DotNetNuke, Joomla, Drupal etc – and good servers are inexpensive. I bought a dual Xenon HP Proliant ML350 on eBay for less than £250. This will be paid back in 6 months or less by cancelling my hosting contract with Webfusion.

There’s nothing in Event Viewer. It seems I need to monitor wp-login.php as it is rendered in the browser to try and identify at which point the browser stops.

Is it possible to set debug options with WordPress so that I can get checkpoints?

Yes, there are two navigation tabs Home and Sample Page; I can move between them OK.

There is also an on-page hyperlink 1 Reply which brings up the reply form if I click it.

The same goes for the Hello World link.

The login link is http://81.174.146.90/wordpress/wp-login.php. Should I check what wp-login.php does?

Where will I find the relevant server error log?

OK; I’ve done that. Got a formatted welcome page (which is progress thank you) but clicking LogIn causes the browser to hang waiting for a response from WordPress.

I should possibly add that http://81.174.146.90/phpmyadmin works fine.

Using PHPMyAdmin and looking at WordPress/wp_options I see

siteurl http://localhost/wordpress yes

Is that the only reference to a URL you need to know?

I assumed you meant the external URL 81.174.146.90 which is a static IP address provided by my ISP. It’s the only URL I’ve seen mentioned anywhere apart from localhost which from memory is 127.0.0.1.