WordPress MU

I'm in a tough situation here - I've just converted an 8 year old site that has tens of thousands of links indexed in Google and Yahoo as http://www.domain.com/subdirectories/ formats. I'm told that http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com and http://subdomain.domain.com are seen by Google and other search engines as three different sites. If you've got a forum at http://www.domain.com/forums and a blog that may have a lot of posts to import at domain.com/blogs, technically I'm told that search engines will see these as two separate sites and you will not obtain the benefit of a large amount of combined content. Regardless of what a couple of brilliant scholars hoping to save the world from typing three characters may think, my understanding is that it's a very bad idea to change all my links on my site to remove the "www" - even with a 301 redirect. And who knows what other config files are set to go to "www" which will be forever require redirection. Anyways, you get the idea.

1) Why isn't there an option that clearly allows you to use or not use the "www" during install? This forced requirement seems almost contrary to the open in "open source."

2) How can I get these blogs to use the www? I've looked at various posts and it's difficult to say what works exactly without tinkering and potentially screwing up the site. I would think it a good idea to sticky an official instruction for this.

3) Is there anyone that can say with assurance that moving an entire site from the www to a non-www approach won't result in lost links in search engines and other locations? When I mean assurance, I mean a statement of fact, not a probability. If there is a probability that things might not go well then not having a "WWW" option seems like a rather poor decision. Willing to hear your thoughts on this one.

Thank you for all comments

PS - here's another funny item I just noticed. All the instances of adding a "www" in these Wordpress forums results in an automatic hyperlink. But if you DON'T type in the www in front, then the URL will just appear as text. Check it out. http://www.domain.com versus domain.com. Another reason why leaving out the "www" makes no sense at all, regardless of carpal tunnel issues.

2 - http://wpmututorials.com/hacks/forcing-mu-to-use-www/ This works.

3 - a 301 redirect. It tells google that all instances of X are now Y.

Andrea -

Thanks for the tutorial. There are several comments discussing problems with the hack. Have you been able to look at the user specific issues?

Regarding the 301, I'm aware of it, thank you. :)

I really hate using "hacked" versions of anything and hope the people at Wordpress will listen to the voice of reason. This isn't a political campaign to right serious wrongs. It is what it is.

It's been hashed over quite a bit, so I don't think it's going to change. WWW is considered a subdomain, from the tech side, so *.yourdomain.com will still answer for www if it knows where to go.

But it's hardcoded to strip it out.

- Also the comments left that indicated issues, I didn't find on my end.

I also would really like to have the option to choose between www and non-www, even after the install, like the 'original' wordpress. At the moment I'm also struggling what to use.

So now I use domain.net/individual_blog, but I'm forced to use domain.net/forums and domain.net/wiki instead of http://www....., in order to not confuse the searchengine's.

So I reaaaally would like the option to choose :-)

While I appreciate your solution, Andrea, MU is not built to handle the www even with your hack. Add to it the need to ensure that ALL domains in MU redirect to the WWW equivalent on every site on which they are installed. If http://www.domain.com is typed in, wordpress immediately shoves you into http://www.domain.com. However, the same is not true in reverse once you tell Wordpress MU NOT to depracate the WWW.

What happens if you don't set up a 301 redirect for every site you have in your blog? I've put it forth below. This means EVERY SINGLE BLOG must be set up with a 301 redirect, at least for the root. I have no idea what else could screw up with Wordpress installed with a WWW. Happy hunting for Wordpress MU owners.

Enjoy... Let's hope the powers that be wake up, lest they continue along this path and become another bumbling Joomla.

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Fatal Error
If your blog does not display, please contact the owner of this site.

If you are the owner of this site please check that MySQL is running properly and all tables are error free.

Could Not Find Blog!
Searched for mysite.com/ in mysite_wproot::wp_blogs table. Is that right?

Yep... we have problems. It's not as simple "the solution." The other items on my site work if depracated but not Wordpress.

WHY WAS AN ARROGANT DECISION MADE TO DEPRACATE THE WWW WITHOUT ANY CHOICE BY THE USER? Now we are wasting time with stupidity that could and should have easily been avoided.

Every one of my competitors, even the multi-million dollar backed sites, redirect their depracated sites to a www version. I'm sure most developers here feel my pain when something so simple results in a growing and unknown quantity of wasted time and embarrassing errors in the future. I'll be damned with every upgrade as well, needing to see where the heck the Wordpress staff has chosen to tell all "www" sites to go to blazes in the code and simply depracate them.

Well that makes me want out and change some RFCs.

Until someone comes up with a solution or a permanent upgrade that gives the user the option to install using the www, it's safe to advertise that Wordpress MU does not work reliably using a http://www.domain.com based URL and is domain.com, www-depracated only.

I can't get my blog subdirectories to redirect, e.g. http://mysite.com/blog1, blog2, etc. to go to http://mysite.com/blog1/whateverhere/. With regard to redirecting the directories, everything I'm trying is resulting in a loop error. If the non-www URL is used, I just get the ugly Wordpress MU error above and ONLY with WP MU and not with other software. I'm hoping SOMEONE can come up with some solution and I'm seeing numerous other people having problems with directories here too with no answers.

I'm just cringing at the ridicule to follow in the blogging/CMS world if this doesn't get fixed shortly...

"WHY WAS AN ARROGANT DECISION MADE TO DEPRACATE THE WWW WITHOUT ANY CHOICE BY THE USER?"

Wow.

1 - yelling is rude.
2. - this is Open Source software. that means the dev choose to release it *as is* for you to use as you please. It's given without warranty OR support. (which is voluntary)

So no, you or I do not have a say. If you search previous threads, you will find ones quite old dealing with this same issue, as well as statements that is *will not* be changed.

The hack I provided above worked back when I used it. I haven't had a chance to test it with newer code.

Since you are, as noted above, a fellow developer, then you should know you can handle the www-to-non-www requests server-side.

If you cannot get your sites to show up via http://mysite.com/blog1/whateverhere/, that's a separate issue.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what the technical issues is that you're having, because you're yelling far too much.

Sorry about the yelling... it's just frustrating realizing that after weeks of work I've been shut down by something that never would have dawned on me to worry about. I wish someone would have highlighted this issue which is contrary to everything the web has been since it was created, open source or not.

If you choose to make your modification to Wordpress MU so that it is installed on http://www.domain.com, any time someone goes to your site NOT using the www, Wordpress MU spits out an error that it cannot find the blog. If a request comes in using http://domain.com, wordpress now only looks for the blog located on domain.com, not on http://www.domain.com as should be presumed.

What does this mean?

1) Every blog that you create using Wordpress MU requires the manual placement of a 301 redirect. Additionally, every blog created by your users who have permission to create blogs will also require manual placement of a 301 redirect. This is not practical, especially with MU.

2) Every update released for Wordpress MU will be a challenge to anyone using Wordpress MU on a www-based domain given the need to make hacks to a process a www-based install in several places. Hopefully, more will not change resulting in unknown errors.

Right now I'm going to work on creating a redirect in the php files to connect depracated requests to a www-based request. I haven't found anyone who has done this yet. At least it will solve the need to create manual 301 redirects. But still, every version of WP MU will need to be reviewed to be hacked to work with someone using a WWW install.

- do the hack mentioned above. It's 1 or 2 lines in one file, that's all you need to keep track of in upgrades.

- add a rewrite rule in htaccess to handle changing non-www to www

- make sure you included the www in your site_url field in the domain field in the site table in the db.

That should do it.

I also feel compelled to point out that Wordpress.com doesn't use www in address, and it's pretty large. :)

lmao

to the original post, i cant belive you can say that about open source, the whole idea of it is to be open so you can make these modifications

furthermore www is the most rediculous waste of time ever, everyone knows its on the new regardless its pointless and you should forget about it now, forget your seo, google will soon realise where your things are just give it a little time lol

hryxx... it is SO funny when someone feels a compelling need to flame others and only makes a further jack-donkey out of themselves. Thanks for commenting.

1) Your inability to spell "ridiculous" or desire to be so "hip" and mispell it shows us where your mindset is at.

2) The need for the www is probably as important as proper spelling in general, which is why we have spell checkers - or maybe you don't realize it either.

3) A frequent amount of open source projects end up in the graveyard because of developers like yourself. Any idiot developer knows that Wordpress isn't going to change the world because it decides that its software will not run what at least 50% of the world still does. And when you tell us that "Google will soon realise" (realize?) then you're laughably telling us that Wordpress is doing what Google isn't smart enough or capable to do.

Thanks for an amazing laugh.

Andrea - thanks so much for your replies, I truly mean that. Unfortunately, (a) keeping track of Wordpress MU hacks and (b) needing to make modifications to the PHP (as you'll see below) is really not a good place to be for something as simple as just installing your site with a "www" in the URL! For such a large site like Wordpress, you would think they would be able handle mistypes such as what just happened to me, ROFL. I typed "my.wordpress.org" and got the following error - which probably would befuddle many coming here, LOL. :)

---------------------------------
Fatal Error
If your blog does not display, please contact the owner of this site.

If you are the owner of this site please check that MySQL is running properly and all tables are error free.

Could Not Find Blog!
Searched for my.wordpress.org/ in wordpress::ros_blogs table. Is that right?

What do I do now?
Read the bug report page. Some of the guidelines there may help you figure out what went wrong.
If you're still stuck with this message, then check that your database contains the following tables:
ros_blogs
ros_users
ros_usermeta
ros_site
ros_sitemeta
ros_sitecategories
If you suspect a problem please report it to the support forums but you must include the information asked for in the WPMU bug reporting guidelines!

This worked for me.

This is One Way to Get WordPress MU 2.7 to Properly Install on a WWW Dot Domain Name.
http://www.manythings.org/b/c/6