Microsoft is making some big announcements today, introducing The Microsoft Web Platform along with their Web Platform Installer, and the Web Application Gallery. What does this have to do with Gallery, an open-source PHP application?
Installing PHP applications on Microsoft IIS on Windows has always been a bit more complex than installing them on a LAMP server, and most Gallery developers do their work on Linux systems running Apache which makes it hard to focus on the Windows side of things. Microsoft's announcements today make things much simpler for people using Windows servers to use Gallery, so we're excited to be included as part of their launch event. Read on for the details.
From Microsoft:
The Web Platform Installer is a simplified download/install experience for all of Microsoft’s free web products. It includes everything that you need to get up and running to build your web solutions – from servers, tools, and technologies, including the most recently updated products. No longer will we be asking you to go to 10 different websites to get your products – with the WebPI, you can do this all through one integrated experience – and all on one website – www.microsoft.com/web. Additionally, the WebPI installs the community version of PHP so you have easy integration with popular web applications.
The Microsoft Web Application Gallery is a community hub of free and popular .NET and PHP applications for you to use as building blocks for creating dynamic web solutions.
We've been working with Microsoft for the past few weeks to package Gallery in a way that works with the Web Platform Installer so that Gallery can be included in the Web Application Gallery, and to verify how smooth this process really is. If you've ever installed Gallery on IIS, or have a Windows machine that you'd like to tinker with Gallery on, you really have to try this new installation process. Clicking the "Install Now" button above will walk you through installing the Web Platform Installer which will then walk you through installing IIS, PHP, and Gallery with just a few clicks. The installer will let you use Gallery with Microsoft SQL Server, but if you want to use MySQL on Windows, you'll need to first follow this walkthrough.
The installer file for Gallery is still hosted by us on SourceForge. The only changes made to Gallery for inclusion in the Web Application Gallery are the addition of a few XML and SQL files specific to the Web Platform Installer, and due to some complications, we've removed the URL Rewrite module from this initial package. Microsoft is working with us to make the URL Rewrite work properly with IIS's brand new rewrite engine, and we'll update our package to include URL Rewrite as soon as this is ready.
