I'm an experienced programmer but I've managed to avoid CMSs so far! I'm now being pressured to convert a site from HTML to WordPress (because that's what everybody uses) but I'd much prefer a flat file CMS such as Grav. But I can't get it to work.
I'm on Windows 11 Home Edition with IIS Version 25H2 and PHP Version 8.3.26 installed. I want to install Grav locally until I've got the site the way I want it, and then upload everything to my shared server via FTP. Is that a reasonable approach?
My IIS WebRoot is C:\External and below this I have several folders for the various website I control. I downloaded Grav Core + Admin plugin and extracted it as C:\External\grav-admin
Then I browsed to http://localhost/grav-admin/
There was one error message: "PHP Zip extension is required but not installed" and lots of warnings.
I downloaded the extension from: http://pecl.php.net/package/zip/1.12.4/windows - 8.3 Non Thread Safe (NTS) X64
I edited my php.ini file and added the line
extension=php_zip.dll
and also uncommented the line: extension_dir = "ext"
I restarted IIS and when I browsed to http://localhost/grav-admin/ it couldn't find http://localhost:80/grav-admin/admin
The physical path is C:\External\grav-admin\admin
The sub-folder doesn't exist, and it's not in the zip file either.
In fact I need the grav_admin lower down my tree structure so that it's within the folder for the website, but I thought I should get it to work under C:\External first. What am I doing wrong?