The MU forums have moved to WordPress.org

Include 'www' in url (18 posts)

  1. alltrade
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Hi,

    I would like to know if there is any clean way to include the 'www' in my url's. Wordpress seems to strip this out and provides no option or choice for people to include using the www.

    My address should look like http://www and NOT http://

    Please don't reply with "www is deprecated". That is just stupid. There are hundreds of reasons why people might want a choice in this decision. If you design a website for a client you can't just make silly excuses, you have to give them what they want. Me and at least 50% of the world would like to use the www version of a domain instead.

    Any help will be much appreciated.

  2. delayedinsanity
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Would a word other than deprecated suffice?

    It's been abandoned, annulled, deserted, discarded, displaced, forsaken, ousted, overruled, rejected, removed, replaced, repudiated, succeeded, supplanted, supplemented, usurped, outmoded, outplaced, and set aside.

    Outside of that, I'm not sure. I couldn't resist though. :)

  3. Driftless1
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    I'm sure this is an incomplete answer - but are you sure the WWW is being stripped out by your domain host? I know on many you have the option to force the WWW (even when someone doesn't type it in) or strip the WWW (even if they do). Check your domain settings.

    Of course there is probably a way to handle this through some re-write, but that's beyond me.

  4. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    WordPress MU strips out the www and so it should. You can, however, set up your DNS and webserver to recognise the www prefix and treat it as the root of your site.

    Once the user is on the site, all the links generated by MU will be sans the www, but that doesn't matter really.

    If I can access your site at both http://www.site.name and site.name then your client should be happy they can advertise the site in both ways. Once a user is on the site, how many times, in all honesty do they look at the address bar and say "ooh that dosn't have a www, I must be on the wrong site".

    Next you'll get people wanting to put www on the front of sub domains.

  5. SteveAtty
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    www of course just being a subdomain any way

  6. alltrade
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Wow thanks! there are some good answers in there.

    Changing a few lines in wpmu-settings.php and index-install.php fixed this nonsense. Luckily I am a firm Drupal believer so I don't really have to deal with silly stuff like this.

    Thanks to this guy:
    http://manojkumar.org/install-wordpress-mu-with-www/

  7. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Just make sure you can also access your site without the www as well, otherwise you are going to annoy all those of us who don't use it at all and laugh at sites that insist on it.

    http://no-www.org/

  8. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    @steveatty: I still have clients who insist on putting http://www.mysub.mydomain.com on their business cards so "people know it's a website".

  9. SteveAtty
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    I've heard that too cafespain, but if the BBC decide that www is not needed then that's good enough for me.

  10. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Yep, got the same http://www.town.localtown.province.ca kind of domains all over the place here for the same reason.

  11. alltrade
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    @cafespain: Yes it still works without the www but obviously it's not the way MU was intended. I really don't care for the www and never worry about using it myself but some clients might not know what's the deal and ONLY care about conformity. If their Main Site uses www then their blog should use www. It looks like a free Wordpress script otherwise and no real company wants that, that's for bloggers. I have started recommending Movable Type to companies who want a professional looking blog.

  12. alltrade
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    http://www.hm2k.com/articles/yes-www

    Many more where that came from. You can argue about this for a few more years to come. Wordpress is the only cms I use that actually tries to force the "no-www" for some strange reason. There is no need to force something like this, no one else does.

  13. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Without the www is EXACTLY the way MU was intended. And WordPress MU enforces the no www, WordPress doesn't.

    And it really doesn't force you anyway. If you have the DNS and server set up correctly then it works fine, it just tidies up after you.

    My clients sites can be accessed at http://www.www.www.www.mysite.com and still work fine.

    And finally, the fundamental argument of the site you linked to is that you need it to separate the protocols. Erm.. that's what ports are for.

  14. Klark123
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    But, why not let admins decide the behavior?

    On one of my servers, I want the content served over SSL. My SSL cert has the name http://www.domain.com (for other reasons). WPMU screws this up.

  15. delayedinsanity
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    http://www.www.www.www.www.www.www.obsessive.compulsive.org

    When communicating URLs its shorter, easier and quicker to use http://www.example.com vs. http://example.com/

    Isn't pure and simple 'example.com' easier than both? And easier to remember? Since a browser is smart enough to suggest the right protocol on its own, we don't really need either www or http://.

    Oh, and admins can decide the behaviour. www works just fine on my server, with both Wordpress standalone and MU. I can type it in for any page and it takes me there without a fuss. If I didn't want it to work, it'd be just as easy to remove the ServerAlias from my apache conf and delete the DNS records.

  16. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Don't get me started on www in SSL certificates :)

    Why use an acronym that takes longer to say than the phrase it's supposed to be shortening?

    The www behaviour is inherent in the way Mu works with sub domains. For speed of processing it "assumes" that anything before it's main domain is a sub blog and goes and finds it, and displays it.

    Why add a level of complexity to an already complex system for less than 1% of the potential audience? When, as already detailed numerous times in this thread and in the others that brought it up, there are ways to get your "system" to recognise both, and that once a user is on your site, they don't care what is in the address bar.

    Sheesh.

  17. fleetadmiralj
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    I fixed this problem by just neutering the code that does the redirecting. Our server here at work where I was trying to install it to experiment with it *requires* a http://www.domain.com address, and it has a pointer from the non-www address to the www address, having the unfortunate after effect of causing a flaming spiral of death when I installed MU (you can see my problems with this with my recent thread in the installation forum).

    The point being is that some people want to use the www and then other people, like myself in this instance, have no choice, and I have to go in and hack the code to try to make it work, because our server people aren't going to change what they're doing.

  18. Klark123
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    I favor URLs without the www, just like anybody I guess. But, I find the fact that WPMU *forcefully* removes the www to be annoying, and frankly kind of pretentious.

    This is the kind of thing one might expect from a Microsoft app... not an open source app!

    I know there are hacks to resolve the problem, but then you end up with mods that you need to carry forth through upgrades, etc.

About this Topic

  • Started 14 years ago by alltrade
  • Latest reply from Klark123