Charette.com Moves to Windows Server + IIS

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I’ve had the charette.com domain since 1995 – it has been my personal web presence for my entire career.  I’ve used it to host video, forums, blog, display my artwork, experiment with technology, and build communities.  Lately, I haven’t done too much to it – it had become stale and broken.  One of the reasons was that I built it using tools that required me to administer the site from a single system.  I knew I had to do something.

A few months ago, my wife said that she’d like to start a blog.  After doing my research, I set it up for her and blogged about it here.  Here’s the site: https://queenofwonder.com

I was so impressed with Graffiti CMS, an ASP.net application, I thought that I might use it on charette.com so I could administer it from anywhere.  In my opinion, everyone should be using some sort of CMS (Content Management System) for their website.  The only problem was that my web host was Linux/Apache and I couldn’t install an Graffiti on it because it is an ASP.net application.  The website is mainly static web pages and a PHPBB forum running with a MySQL database.  Since IIS can run both ASP.net and PHP applications and MySQL, I could migrate the database and PHPBB from the Linux/Apache website to the IIS/Windows Server website.  Here’s how I did it:

  1. I created a new empty MySQL database on the new server
  2. I used SQLyog to transfer the database from the old server to the new server
  3. I installed PHPBB on the new server and ran through the configuration
  4. I set appropraite permissions on the directories as outlined in the PHPBB installation instructions
  5. I modified the PHPBB config.php to point at the new database instead of the empty database created during the installation

There were some minor hiccups in configuring the PHPBB app, I think they were caused by the file transfer process.  I had to open some of the template files and save them again.  Here it is running: www.charette.com/phpbb

In all, I’m very impressed with the ability to run both PHP and APS.net application on a single IIS server along with a variety of databases: VistaDB (that’s what Graffiti CMS uses), MySQL and SQL Server.  Window Server rocks!