Getting Joomla sh404SEF To Work On Microsoft IIS

I was working with a 1.0 version of Joomla and wanted to get the sh404SEF module to work with IIS. It wasn't easy, but in the end, I got it all working as though it were running under Linux Apache.

Here's a few things I did to make this happen:

• Made sure the global config option in Joomla for Search Engine Friendly URLs was turned on.
• Installed the Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter for IIS. This filter gives IIS rewrite capabilities that basically match that of mod_rewrite. Install instructions can be found here.
• Installed the rewrite rules mentioned here in IsapiRewrite4.ini.
• Added these additional rules to IsapiRewrite4.ini:

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_URL} ^(/component/option,com) [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_URL}      ^.*[.]html.*$
  RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.php [QSA,L,U]
  

• In the sh404SEF configuration, advanced section, I chose:

    Rewrite mode:  with .htaccess (mod_rewrite)
  

• Now here was the really tricky part. In apache, if you rewrite a URI from:

    /Learn-About-My-App
  

  to:

    /doc?title=Learn-About-My-app
  

  the environment variable REQUEST_URI stays /Learn-About-My-App. In IIS, REQUEST_URI is updated to /doc?.... The result? sh404SEF won't work with IIS. To fix this, I made the following the very first line of code in components/com_sef/sef.php:

    $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL']) ? 
       $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL'] : $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ;
  

Good luck getting IIS to play nice with Joomla - I've learned first hand, you're going to need it.