Contrary to the responses, to most all of the posts at the WordPress forums, that ask how to get permalinks working on Windows IIS installs of WordPress, you do not need to convert to Linux! Some of us actually like the great .NET OO languages and rich class library.

After a bit of looking around, I found John Sessford’s article at http://www.ikailo.com/94/url-modrewrite-workaround-iis-60 on how to setup a custom 404 error handler using php code that addresses permalinks. I have verified this works for GoDaddy’s new grid hosting using IIS7 where GoDaddy no longer installs the Microsoft URL Rewrite module.

Do the following steps to implement:

1. Backup your database to your web folder and then backup your website with FTP in case anything goes wrong.
2. Get John’s php code from his article [referenced above] and create a file called 404-handler.php in your main WordPress folder. You can change the name as long as you also change $thisfile in the php code.
3. Use the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center/Settings/404 Error Behaviour to set 404 errors to Use custom page and set the location of the above file entering the relative path to the file.
4. Login to your WordPress site as an admin and update Settings/Permalinks to a custom value such as one of:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/

That’s it! Best of both worlds – WordPress and .NET!

I’m still very new at WordPress and there may be performance or other ramifications to the above hack. If you know of any or know a better solution for GoDaddy WIMP please comment [wow, we sure got the leftovers on that acronym].

Dave