After spending way to much time on my dilemma, I was finally able to install WordPress on Windows Server 2008. I spent a lot of time searching the Internet and despite all the tutorials out there, none of them helped except one fluke web site which happened to work. First I will tell you do not attempt to use isapi but instead use fastcgi. The tutorial I found is located at thewebhostinghero.com.
There seems to be specific builds you need in order to get everything working in unison. You may have to do a Google search and verify before you download, that the versions offered are in fact the versions listed here.
After following the steps on thewebhostinghero.com open the MySQL database console type in the root password and run the following commands to create the wordpress database:
create database wordpress; (press enter)
grant all privileges on wordpress.* to ‘root’@'%’ indentified by ‘password’; (press enter)
flush privileges; (press enter)
exit (press enter)
Now extract the WordPress zip file into your inetpub/wwwroot/ directory and edit wp-config-sample.
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress‘); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root‘); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘root password‘); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
All the fields in red need to match what you had setup. Initially, your mysql database will only have one user, and that user will be root. You can either keep this, or create a new user and granting that user all privileges. If you go about creating a new user, it may be easier to use phpmyadmin which can be obtained from sourceforge.net. If you decide to use root, then you will also have to use the password that you created when you first installed mysql. After you make your changes, save the file as wp-config.php and point your browser to http://localhost/wp-admin/install.php and follow the instructions.
Note that the current version of WordPress has a serious bug which will NOT create any tables in the database. The WordPress team likes to blame it on other people, however, it is in fact the WordPress developers not paying attention and making their code incompatible with newer versions of mysql. That goes to say too, that the MySQL team are also breaking their code and the only release thus far that will work with server 2008 is the one listed above, or the 6.0 alpha release, but I did not try the 6.0 alpha with the working versions of WordPress and PHP. I mention this in case anyone decides to try and upgrade their database, WordPress or PHP. If you do, please back everything up first.
