Storage facilities

CMS continued

Welcome back to this month's Server Room, where I'll be carrying on my project to set up a Course Management System (CMS). This is pretty much like a Content Management System for educators, so pay attention at the back or you'll be in detention.

Back to the job in hand. So far I've successfully installed and configured Internet Information Server (IIS) 7 on Windows Server 2008 and then installed PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor). As an aside, PHP really does stand for PHP Hypertext Processor - a recursive acronym or sort of smart-arsed nerdy joke. It used to stand for Personal Home Page, but was changed to PHP Hypertext Processor because someone liked messing with people's heads. When I left the story last month PHP was ready to be integrated with IIS 7, so that's what I'm going to do now.

To achieve this you'll need to run Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, which you can either invoke from inside Server Manager, or from its own entry in Administrative Tools. Once it's running, highlight the server name in the left-hand pane and you'll be greeted by a set of icons in the middle pane, which should be labelled "Servername Home". Look for Handler Mappings and place your mouse pointer over it to find out what it does (it enables you to "Specify resources that handle responses for specific request types"). In plain English, that means this is where you create a module that enables IIS 7 to work with your new installation of PHP. Now you need to tell IIS 7 where PHP is located, and what type of module you want.

Double-click on Handler Mappings, and you'll see in the centre pane a list of the disabled and enabled modules in IIS 7. You're going to create a new module for FastCGI, so click on "Add Module Mapping..." in the right-hand pane then, with the Add Module Mapping dialog open, fill in the following values:

Request Path: *.php

Module (select from drop-down list): FastCgiModule

Executable: C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe

Name: PHP FastCGI

You can choose any name you like, but I just went for an easily identifiable one. If you click on the <...> button to browse for the executable file you might be momentarily nonplussed when you get to your PHP folder, on discovering that all you can see are lots of .dll files. However, look in the bottom right-hand corner of the Open dialog and you'll see a dropdown that defaults to only showing DLLs. Click on this and select *.exe instead, and you'll now see the three executable files that are in that folder.

Click OK when you've finished filling in the fields, answer Yes to create a FastCGI application, and you should see your new module appear in the Enabled list in the centre pane. That's it - job done, and IIS 7 is now configured to use your PHP installation, which you can prove by firing up the oldest code editor in use in Windows today. That's right, it's Notepad time. Fire it up, and enter the following line: