Chanh's blog

I revisit WebMatrix site recently just to see what’s up with this nice little web editor from Microsoft and I must say I am in for a pleasantly surprise!

WebMatrix turn into a small full Web development that installs quickly and it support database and PHP. It comes with a build in IISExpress and it works extremely well for web site development.

If you use the web installer to install the open source script like WordPress, Drupal, etc then WebMatrix will configure to support PHP automatically but if you create a site from scratch you have to do some manual tweaking!

You have to edit and a few lines in the config file as shown below and will you be able to edit your PHP file in your site.

C:\Users\[youruserlogin]\Documents\IISExpress8\config\applicationhost.config

< location path="wordpress" >
< system.webServer >
< handlers >
< add name="PHP via FastCGI" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="C:\Program Files\PHP\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" / >
< /handlers >
< /system.webServer >
< /location >


Note: The above is assuming you install PHP from the web installer

Relevant links:

http://www.asp.net/WebMatrix

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/features/

Mod_rewrite was the only mean to have search engine friendly URL for a long time but it is no longer the case with this Microsoft URL rewrite module! It is extremely easy to use not like Mod_rewrite!

I will write more on how to use this URL rewrite module at my Docs site later but for now I will just post some high light!

Once this module is installed there are three templates available and they are:

# User Friendly URL
# Rule with Rewrite Map
# Request Blocking

There are so much more you can do with it!

You can download it here.

You can get more information here.