In a previous article we discussed rewriting the site URL to remove index.php in ExpressionEngine on Windows IIS. The method uses a free Isapi filter, the Ionic Isapi Rewrite Filter, to accomplish what mod_rewrite would on Apache. Many WordPress users would like to remove index.php as well, and the Ionic filter can do the same thing for WordPress.
The engine behind ExpressionEngine is the file index.php. This file appears in the URL in front of the template group name and template name:
xigent.com/dev/index.php/site/article
In some cases you may want to remove index.php from the URL - namely, to make it shorter and cleaner. On Apache, mod_rewrite would accomplish this. But on Windows IIS, the procedure is different. Our preferred method, using the free Ionics ISAPI filter, is fairly simple but does require some server configuration. Below we describe the steps involved.
We frequently experience minor issues when configuring PHP applications that require email, like WordPress. Periodically, the client site is on a Windows server, which requires the use of SMTP to send email. On a Linux/Apache server, the PHP mail function is very simple and almost always works with the application out of the box.
In one particular case, for a WordPress installation we wanted to use Gmail as the SMTP server so mail would go directly to a Gmail account. We knew smtp.gmail.com could be used in an email client such as Outlook, but didn’t know about configuring it in WordPress. A quick search led us to this post in the WordPress forums, which describes a pretty simple method for setting smtp.gmail.com as the outgoing server. To get it to work, we had to omit one step, which we describe in this article.
We often use SMTP to handle email in ExpressionEngine, especially if we’re installing on a Windows server. ExpressionEngine supports PHP Mail, Sendmail, and SMTP. We found that using SMTP with a mail server running qMail requires some changes to the ExpressionEngine EEmail class in the file core.email.php. The problem is that the EEmail class creates what is called a bare LF (line feed). Qmail will reject messages with a bare LF, causing a send failure. Confused? It’s ok - the fix is quite easy.
For mobile blogging, or updating web site content on the fly, the ability to publish content via email is a must. Easy to use, yet not always easy to implement. The Moblog module in ExpressionEngine is a good solution that’s easy to deploy and customize. Here is a very simple example.
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