A tale of woe... (IIS 8)

I have a tale of woe.

I have been trying to build a photo gallery intranet for a small public sector organisation.

I had been looking at Piwigo. But after reaching a few deadends and becoming increasingly annoyed with its poor administration section I decided to experiment with some other options. After trying about 5 different sites, I tried out gallery.

I did a nice little install on XAMPP and began playing with settings. Pretty soon I had a perfect photo gallery. There were admins with complete control. But then there were moderators who could upload photos and tag them. The easy flash built way of uploading and editing and tagging photos was perfect. By the end of it all, I was so pleased with myself I went running to our IT department.

'Stop!' I cried. 'Bin Piwigo! We have Gallery now'. I explained to them my story of that day, how I had spent the last four hours on a XAMPP local install editing the site to perfection. The IT guys looked pleased. We took Piwigo and sent it to its Recycle Bin grave and placed in the Gallery files. We fire up the install, and then bam! "Gallery cannot install on Windows Server."

'Never mind', I said, 'there's this neat little trick I found where you comment it out.' After all, I had already done this with my XAMPP install. We cheerily plodded on, found the php, commented out the line and re-loaded our website expecting Gallery to arrive.

"Short open tag must be on." Oh, that's new, I thought to myself. Five minutes of php fiddling later, we restart the server and reboot the install.

"Short open tag must be on." Ah. We look and look but nothing makes it go away. I remain certain that I have stumbled across some vicious Windows incompatability curse. And now once more I am forced back to the dark ages of Piwigo, dejected and dissapointed.

Basic jist, is a) I know I don't deserve sympathy but I'd like some anyway.

b) Why is Gallery Project so hard to install on Windoes servers. Surely there can't be that fewer people on the system? I've never had this problem before with any other freeware software. Is it that common, and should I be more aware of it in the future?

c) If anyone else has some other good photo galleries to try I'd love reccomendations. Must have a good tagging system, be able to cope well with batch uploading and editing and be able to cope with pretty sizable galleriers... oh and work on a Windows server.

and d) most importantly - if anyone has a miracle solution to my problem, or reckons they may be able to help with a bit more logical information on my end as opposed to this diatribe, then I'd really welcome any help I can get. So feel free to ask away if you're willing to try and help. I am running a Windows Server 2012 off IIS 8.

(I know this isn't the usual error reporting, but I felt this chapter might make you feel my pain a little more than a simple tech help request)

Gallery really is effortless to install on a Windows platform as long as you run Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or 2012. The *only* issue you'll have is you have to pay the php script URL_Rewrite for anything below 2008. In 2008+ it's now a download via Microsoft to enable rewrite. If it can run on Linux, it *WILL* run on Windows. FACT.

Read the wiki Sup posted that I wrote and you will see that in truth.

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Windows Install Guide