WordPress MU

I just want to thrown my 2 cents into the bucket here. This is clearly a preference issue. WWW is not deprecated, and if you *want* to use 'www', you should be able to. Just like you can choose whether to use subdomains or subdirectories. Or specify a quota for individual blogs. MU has awesome support for user preferences, I don't see why this should be an exception.

A good example is "browsehappy.com." It's just a web site that encourages people not to use IE. But does MU enforce you to use Firefox? No, because that would be silly and unreasonable. I also think it's unreasonable to think that everyone out there would want a system where you can't use "www" without upgrade-breaking hacks, just because someone decided to put a web site up called "no-www.org".

I agree with 'thelaw': this is something that should be repeated.

I also agree with 'thornelawler': this move seems immature, and I was completely surprised to see it come from WP after I've been continually impressed beyond all my expectations in every other area.

Finally, I'll say that I haven't contributed to WP in terms of code. So I guess I don't have any room to talk. But when something so controversial is brought up, I think feedback from the community is important, and I hope this comes off as constrictive criticism, because I didn't intend it to be a rant.

-Steve

Also... I have a hard time believing that no-www.org is the only rationale behind this decision because a) no useful contact information is given on that site, and b) then have fewer than 50,000 domains registered (over 5 years? that's all?)

I have a hard time believing that people insist on adding four characters to what will normally become a really long URL. If they both go to the same place, what's the point? I don't care about no-www.org or any of that. Isn't broken, YMMV, standard disclaimers apply, to each his own; but I prefer short over uselessly long.

spherical, I tend to agree with you. The problem for me is that when you're integrating this product into an existing system where there are dependencies on 'www' (for whatever unfortunate reason), you should be allowed to use it that way.

You nailed it: you would "prefer" short over uselessly long. It's a preference. I believe MU should consider treating it that way, as well, instead of a mandate.

Haven't tried it myself but it appears to be a fairly easy fix:

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

You don't need that hack anymore for 2.7.1 - the lines have been removed.

@sowsinsk

Can you not begin a program of 301 redirects in .htaccess to get rid of the unfortunate baggage you're carrying forward into new projects? More efficient and you won't lose any page rank.

@spherical - some things are out of my control :)

Regarding the hack, I got that working (under 2.7.1), but I have two issues: we'll have to re-apply the hack upon upgrades, and we also have to figure out how to patch the code when a user creates a new blog (so we don't have to constantly monitor MySQL and make sure the 'www' is in the domain).

So... these are concessions that I'll have to make :) I'm just voicing my opinion in hopes that there is ever reconsideration about this feature at some point. Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

THERE IS.

It came up in trac, there were countless tickets on it. Support will be rolled in. At least for the main blog URL.