path info on IIS

[beavis]

I am trying to install a CMS on shared Windows hosting, but I am having the following problem according to the CMS support knowledge base:

"The problem here is that your server isn’t correctly supporting the ”path_info” server variable. You might want to contact your Host or server admin about having it supported, since that would be the ideal way to run..."

However, the CMS people don't know Windows servers very well and haven't been able to tell me exactly what I need to tell my host to "support the path_info variable" Is this enough info for any WebmasterWorld gurus to tell me what I need to request from my host or to explain to me in English what exactly is going on?

[encyclo]

Are we talking about a PHP-based CMS, or ASP?

[mrMister]

By the looks of it, he's trying to run ExpressionEngine which is a PHP based CMS.

[beavis]

It is PHP - Expression Engine as above.

[jdMorgan]

Path info, as supported on Apache 2.0 and later servers with the AcceptPathInfo [httpd.apache.org] directive, is a function that takes the requested URL-path, and tests it to see if that path resolves to an existing filepath. If not, it progressively trims back the URL-path one element at a time until the path resolves to an existing filepath. It then takes the path information that it trimmed off the URL-path, and makes that available as a server variable PATH_INFO, that can be accessed by a script.

The basic idea is that you can start with a URL-path like "/script" and then append more information to the URL, such as "/script/shop/widgets/green". AcceptPathInfo might then trim back the URL-path to "/script" --which actually resolves to "/script.php" because you've got a RewriteRule to do that-- and then pass the remainder of the path, "/shop/widgets/green" as the variable PATH_INFO, so that script.php can parse it.

I'm not sure how you might support this on IIS, though.

Jim