man999

If you don’t bother paying a few bucks, you can use iis mod-rewrite or isapi-rewrite. Both enable .htaccess support on iis. One of the vendors has a useful setup guide:

https://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/articles/CleanPermalinksWordpress.html

Note that if you don’t carefully setup Dean lee’s isapi filter, it may conflict with other websites. If you have problems setting up this filter, you can alternatively use iis mod-rewrite pro, which I personally recommend (but it’s not free).

If your provider won’t install for you a mod_rewrite equivalent for IIS, then you got to use permalinks of this form:

domain.com/index.php/about

Not very fancy, but a lot better than domain.com/?p=123

I don’t think you can get a solid answer for plug-ins. Just setup a test machine similar to your hosting provider’s and test all the plug-ins you are about to use, before you build the new wordpress site on the real server.

You need IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro to get rid of the index.php in your URLs. The tool is commercial, but it pays back.

They also have a detailed step-by-step guide for setting up wordpress clean permalinks on IIS. It involves some tweaking, but it’s simple and works fine.

https://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/articles/CleanPermalinksWordpress.html

I have successfully tested this with WP 2.3.x and 2.2.x, so it’s interesting to see if it works with WP 2.5 too, if anybody tries it.