Installing Community Server on Windows Server 2008
After making the decision to make use of CS2008 as my blogging engine, I started installing it this morning on a clean Windows 2008 machine. For those of you who are trying to get this to work on Windows 2008, here’s some tips and tricks.
Download Community Server: http://communityserver.com/
You can get the express edition like what I did which is free to use for non-commercial purposes (go read the agreement).
To get CS to work you will need to get these software:
.NET Framework 3.5 SP1: Download details- .NET Framework 3.5
Windows Installer 4.5 for Windows 2008: Windows Installer 4.5 is available
SQL 2008/2005 Express: SQL Server 2008 Express
For SQL to work, you will need to have .NET framework 3.5 and Windows Installer 4.5 so do make sure you have both installed before you start the SQL installation.
When you everything installed, then it’s time for you to install Community Server. Installation is very smooth and at the end of the installation, they will ask you to try to install CS onto IIS automatically for you (with you specifying which site to install in):
However, at this time, some of you might encounter an error that the CS installation cannot talk to IIS. This is one of the issue you will encounter if you are installing on IIS 7. Here’s the solution to the problem:
Go to server manager and make sure IIS 6 management compatibility is installed. When I install IIS7 on Windows 2008, this is not installed by default. Once you add that package, your installation will be able to communicate with IIS and setup the required files.
When you are done, you should be able to successfully install Community Server!
Okay, now you’ve setup your blog and you want to start posting to it via Windows Live Writer: Writer Zone - Windows Live which is an awesome blogging tool!, you might encounter a problem (this issue might occur even if you are using normal posting mode via the website but I didn’t verify it). Pictures that are uploaded along with your blog post end up getting a 500 Internal Server Error. Upon doing some research, it seems that the issue is related to how “Managed Pipeline” is handled by IIS.
By default, it should be Integrated for all new Application Pool. What I did is to switch it to Classic and STOP/START, then proceed to switch back to Integrated (STOP/START). I have no idea why this worked but my pictures starts to appear after making this change. Thou some article on the web suggested switching from Integrated to Classic solves the error 500 issue with pictures on the blog. If you encounter the same problem and found a more reliable solution, please do contact me v-yishen.microsoft.com (remove the first dot and put @).
I have everything installed and things are working great now!