Soon after I installed WordPress on my Windows Home Server (WHS) which runs IIS I realized my permalink options were limited since IIS does not support mod_rewrite. I definitely wanted to produce Pretty Permalinks, therefore, I spent some time searching plausible solutions that would mimic mod_rewrite capabilities so I could accomplish this goal. What I found were several workaround tutorials that explained how to create 404 redirects while others provided instructions on how to use PHP and INI files in association with a ISAPI Rewrite Filter. Nonetheless, I was not interested in going through all the tedious steps in these workarounds so I continued doing my homework. Thanks to a project on Google Code I was able to find a solution that works perfectly and only takes minutes to implement.
Before I take you through the steps let me back up a minute for those of you who are not familiar with Pretty Permalinks. Permalinks are the permanent URLs to individual blog posts, as well as archives, categories, and other blog postings. According to WordPress, “Pretty Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible to the people who click them, and should therefore be crafted in such a way that they make sense, and not be filled with incomprehensible parameters.” For example, if you choose the permalink “Month and Name” option it would produce a URL that would look like this: