Joomla - Windows or Linux?

S

Sailor

Perch
Just wondering if anyone's had experience installing Joomla? Any reason I should favor Win or Linux platform? This would be an existing Joomla site I'm moving from another (unresponsive) host, probably on Linux.

Has anyone ever migrated an existing site before? Are there database issues I need to be aware of?

thanks
 
Well, I'm familiar with Drupal, which is like Joomla insofar as it being a PHP CMS application. While I prefer working in Windows environments as I do a lot of ASP.NET development, I have to do a lot of PHP work for my clients too.

So I looked into Drupal on Windows/IIS environments. One gotcha was the .htaccess rewrite rules needed for clean urls, which uses mod_rewrite available on Apache/Unix. I assume Joomla does something similar, so you don't end up with weird urls like mysite.com/node/1/etc, and rather you get mysite.com/my-groovy-product/

On Unix/Linux with Apache, you are set, however with Windows and IIS6, you have to use the free or paid version of ISAPI Rewrite Full or ISAPI Rewrite Free.

If the Windows web server is IIS7, it comes with rewrite module, you don't need anything extra, but you'll have to modify the rules in order to match the .htaccess rules from Drupal, or in your case Joomla, since it expects a Unix/Linux environment with Apache or similar Nix-based web server.

Here's a link to the rewrite module of IIS7
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-url-rewrite-module/

I got the link from this article on Clean URLS on IIS. It's for Drupal but it should apply to Joomla and any other web application/CMS that uses mod_rewrite.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/25404

Some other things are that you may have to enable some PHP extensions if Joomla uses something special (ie. cURL, SimpleXML, etc), but Jodohost can help you with that if you need the PHP dlls enabled.

Ultimately though, unless there is a strong need to run in Windows, I suggest running your PHP app, in this case Joomla, in a Unix/Linux set-up rather than windows. Less issues to solve. For instance, some PHP apps only like certain configuration like to only run in ISAPI or FastCGI, if on Windows.

In my case, I'm trying to setup an ecommerce store for an existing ASP.NET site here, and the client wants to use Ubercart, the e-commerce add-on for Drupal since he is familiar with it, so that's why I've been looking into this.

As for the MySQL/database migration, I would imagine that would be fairly standard procedure of backup of MySQL db and importing to a new MySQL server.

I'm sure the Joomla community has lots of people saying how they got Joomla on Windows, if you decide to go that route. I know I read someone here running OSCommerce successfully on there Windows account.
 
windows servers are IIS6, Hsphere won't be supporting IIS7 anytime in the next year, no betas even have it :(
 
@Sailor, I've migrated Joomla sites from other hosts to JodoHost before without issues. Go with Linux, definitely. As for database issues, make sure the existing host isn't running a newer version of MySQL than your account here. If it is, when you do the DB export, use the compatibility option to select the version running here. If you're setting up here before making the DNS changes, you'll have to enter the temporary URLs (d12345.yourservicedomain. com) in the config file otherwise links will probably end up going back to the old host, which gets pretty confusing. Update the config once you migrate DNS.

Tim
 
To add to this. It appears that Joomla's friendly URLs don't work on JodoHost's Windows servers. I know that there's no way to have mod_rewrite / .htaccess type functionality but I kind of expected the next best thing to work which is this sort of thing:

http://www.example.com/index.php/somepath

I did some fiddling with a simple phpinfo page and initially phpinfo.php/somepath gave a 404 error. Then I set cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 in php.ini. That fixes the 404 error but Joomla just displays the home page regardless of url. The /somepath is there in the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable so it could theoretically be made to work but it appears that Joomla uses a different variable that JodoHost's php on Windows setup doesn't supply. I think it might be looking for REQUEST_URI.

I'm interested to hear if anyone has gotten this to work. I know that moving to Linux is probably the real solution.

Thanks
Ross
 
have you tried it without the index.php? If index.php is the default, I don't think it should need that.
 
Stephen said:
have you tried it without the index.php? If index.php is the default, I don't think it should need that.
Click to expand...

You mean http://www.example.com/somepath ?

Thanks but no, that's not going to work. Surely the only way that would get anything other than a 404 without any rewrite software is if there is a directory called somepath with an index.php in it.

It's a relatively standard technique as a sort of poor man's SEO and it works on most web servers with nothing special. I've used it for php, aspx and cfm. You can do things like:

http://www.example.com/index.php/key1/value1/key2/value2.html

With the right code, that can act the same as:

http://www.example.com/index.php?key1=value1&key2=value2
 
tetranz said:
You mean http://www.example.com/somepath ?

Thanks but no, that's not going to work. Surely the only way that would get anything other than a 404 without any rewrite software is if there is a directory called somepath with an index.php in it.

It's a relatively standard technique as a sort of poor man's SEO and it works on most web servers with nothing special. I've used it for php, aspx and cfm. You can do things like:

http://www.example.com/index.php/key1/value1/key2/value2.html

With the right code, that can act the same as:

http://www.example.com/index.php?key1=value1&key2=value2
Click to expand...

We haven't done anything to disable this, just to confirm that for you.
 
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