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Version: 4.x

enabling-search-engine-friendly-sef-urls-on-iis-iis7

If you have a server running IIS 7 and PHP, you can take advantage of IIS's own internal URL rewriting by using a web.config file similar to the one listed below.

You can create the file yourself or use the GUI in the IIS7 Manager. You can import .htaccess rules using the GUI/wizard.

This functionality depends on the presence of the IIS URL Rewrite Module, which does not come with Windows. It is a free download and a Microsoft product.

GUI

If the IIS URL Rewrite module is installed, your website manager will have a tool for "URL Rewrite", visible in the IIS Manager's view of your site's configurable IIS modules. The interface is largely self-explanatory. Regular expressions, wildcards or exact matches are all supported.

In the Joomla config turn on both the SEF and Apache mod_rewrite, next create a rule under IIS URL Rewrite:

Pattern field: ^([^/]+)/?\$

Ignore case ON

Action type: Rewrite

Rewrite URL: index.php/

web.config

This has been tested on Joomla 1.5 with IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 with no problems so far. For more information on converting .htaccess to web.config, check out http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/557/translate-htaccess-content-to-iis-webconfig/