Issues with FastCGI and links containing index.php? versus index.php

Question

On a Windows 2003 server running IIS 6.0 and FastCGI with an ExpressionEngine-powered website, I've encountered an issue where links containing index.php fail unless a question mark is added.

The basic issue is that if a link points to "index.php/archive/article", the page fails to load (see below) but it will work when "index.php?/archive/article" is used.

What happens when the "index.php" links fail is the URL will change in the browser address bar, but the main page content is still displayed. Append a question mark to "index.php" and the page loads properly.

The site was previously running with ISAPI as the Server API with no issues: the server saw "index.php" and "index.php?" as being synonymous and pages with "index.php" in the path would load as expected.

How would I configure setting somewhere which would tell FastCGI to treat "index.php" and "index.php?" the same way?

I am a bit green when it comes to Windows servers; my experience is mostly with Apache servers running on Unix boxes.

Any guidance or pointers would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

One option is that you could simply enable EE's force URL query string option.

But, if you don't like having the question mark in the URL, you can try this workaround.

I can't say that I know anything about Windows servers, but this has worked for me on Apache servers when running PHP as CGI. Best of luck!