Magento with Windows IIS

andy18    Others     Magento installation Windows

Magento has been around at the market for some time and it has become popular. The application is designed to run well in Linux environment but it also works with Windows. There’s not much installation notes at the Magento Wiki. As I try to poke around to get it up and running on the Windows 2003 running IIS6, I came across with some issues.

Some googling around I have came across this “Guide to Successfull Magento installation @ IIS” which I have found it has all the things you need to pick up. Take note about the PHP configuration on the IIS, if you are not able to make it work with the ISAPI option, try change it to the php-cgi.exe module. Have fun!

Mailenable 2.x Webmail calendar feature

andy18    Others    

I was running some upgrade to refresh my memory on the Mailenable Professional to Enterprise edition. Everything runs well except that some of the new features in the version 2.0 is not showing up on the webmail after the upgrade, this include the calendar feature.

Additionally, some of the new ‘bugs’ I notice is that the Mailenable MMC shortcut available at the Start Menu is still pointing to the old Mailenable Professional MMC option. I notice this as the Mailenable MMC that I fire up does not shows the new features in Mailenable Enterprise. I ended up update the Mailenable Enterprise shortcut on the Start Menu to point to the new target.

For the webmail, when it loads, it is not showing the new Enterprise level skin when I first try it out. Apparently the default base folder is set to the “default” (Pro) version. In order to have the new Enterprise level new skin, you will need to change the default base by navigating within the Mailenable MMC console to “Servers> localhost> Services> Webmail”, right click on the webmail and select “Properties”. In the webmail porperties window navigate to the “Site Options” tab, here you will be able to select the default base. Use the dropdown menu and select “enterprise”. Restart the IIS services as well after this and try refresh your webmail browser. You should get the new interface.

Force Queue run in Exim

andy18    Others    

If you would like to force your Exim mail server to retry the frozen emails in your mail queue, you may issue the following command as root :

shell#> exim -v -qff

Skype is offline?

andy18    Others    

Those users who has rely very heavy on Skype as part of their daily or business communication will find having problems to get connected on yesterday. This including me

Skype has published on their blog saying is one of their algorithm within their networking software which causes the issues. However, some may have believe that the downtime of Skype is due to some published DDoS exploit on the Skype application which causes this.

So far when I tried to connect right now, I am still not able to get connected

Wordpress Friendly URL in Windows IIS

andy18    Others    

Most of the users who is using Wordpress love one of the features – Premalink that will help your blog to have a better position with search engine crawl. By default, Wordpress display your post to something like this http://www.andy.name.my/?p=456 . We will need to change the way this display to a more friendly readable format by the search engine spider – something like http://www.andy.name.my/index.php/year/month/date/post_title/. Other than the above reason, it gives some rough summary about what your post is to your readers.

Wordpress is written in PHP based environment and is capable of running on any operating system backend – Windows or Linux; as long as the server support PHP and MySQL.

Users who host their Wordpress in Linux environment won’t find any issues enabling Premalink for their blog as Apache comes with a module namely mod_rewrite that support this. However, users who has setup their Wordpress at Windows is not able to enable this option – Reasons? Most of the hosting provider by default is running IIS on the Windows Server environment and the main thing is that mod_rewrite module is only applicable for Apache. Guess what? I am one of the user who host my blog on a Windows and find it problematic to enable the permalink. While I was thinking to switch over to Linux, I came across this post which have save my time of doing the migration of files over.

It’s some simple to have Premalink enabled for your Wordpress in Windows IIS environment as follow:

1. Create a php.ini file with the following lines in the file and upload it to your root directory of your Wordpress installation directory.

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

2. Enable the Premalink options in your WordPress by going to Options > Premalinks