WordPress MU

I just did a fresh installation of WPMU (2.8.4a) for our organization. I want to use the hostname of 'www.myschool.edu', but I was informed by the installer that:

WordPress µ strips the string "www" from the URLs of sites using this software. It is still possible to visit your site using the "www" prefix with an address like http://www.ohsu.edu but any links will not have the "www" prefix. They will instead point at ohsu.edu.

The preferred method of hosting blogs is without the "www" prefix as it's more compact and simple.

Well, you see, that just doesn't work for me. While I agree in theory that the 'www.' portion of a URL is not necessary, it turns out that our organizational infrastructure requires it. Let me explain.

Our network engineers recently implemented Active Directory. They use the hostname 'myschool.edu' as a round-robin DNS entry for 8 different Domain Controller. For security reasons, we do NOT wish to host HTTP services on the domain controllers. Rather, we host our HTTP servers on different hardware and must use the 'www.myschool.edu' to hit our load balanced VIP for web applications.

Internally (on our intranet), 'myschool.edu' resolves to this RR DNS entry, but externally we can resolve 'myschool.edu' to our HTTP VIP on our load balancer. So, I can deploy WPMU at this site, and it will 'work', but only for external clients. Internal clients will not be able to use to the site to login as all of the URLs constructed within the WPMU system will not have the 'www.' string in the URL host header, which will resolve to an IP that doesn't accept requests on port 80.

I find this decision by the WPMU developers to be short-sighted. There are plenty of valid reasons why organizations must use the 'www.' prefix in their host headers. Now, I have to use a subdomain of 'blogs.myschool.edu', which will require me to purchase another SSL certificate, request a new firewall rule, and a new load balanced VIP. Tons of extra work on my part because WPMU thinks they know better than me how the 'web' should work.

And don't even get me started on how the software does not use RELATIVE URLs properly. Didn't we all learn this lesson back in 1998?

You can "fix" WPMU to work with the www subdomain if you have to have it.

I presume you will be running in subdirectory mode?

I will be running in subdirectory mode. I realize I can hack the source code, but I'd prefer not to. I like having the automatic updates, and I don't want to have to re-write the core every time I want to update the installation.

For now, I'll just deploy this on a 'valid' sub-domain. I was just venting on what I thought were bad programming practices.

Fuseboxer,

Can you set up a proxy that all traffic goes through? If so, you could have the proxy look at each request and direct it accordingly. If it gets a http://www.ohsu.edu request, it can redirect it to the WordPress site. If it gets ohsu.edu, it'll redirect to your load balancer.

At my university, we're doing something very similar in order to have two Web servers running. Our proxy does redirection and rewriting in order to make everything look like it's coming from http://www.school.edu when it is really coming form web.school.edu and load.school.edu.

<tim>

My understanding of proxies is that they will alter the host header for the requests (inbound and/or outbound). So, for sites that use relative URLs, all of the URLS in the HTML body appear to be from the proxy server and not the originating server. However, for site that do not use relative URLs (WPMU?), the headers are fine, but the URLS in the HTML body are still effectively hard-coded to the originating (back-end) server.

I could be wrong, but this is what I've seen when using mod_proxy in Apache.

You are correct. However, you can use proxy rewriting to change the originating server when using relative URLs. I just thought I'd mention it in case it helped you.

@Tim,

You (also) are correct. However WPMU does NOT use relative URLs. Both 'http://' and the configured hostname ('example.edu') are used to construct all URLs within the HTML body.

I can't even use a proxy to make my site secure. It works for the first page load, but all URLs within the HTML body will begin with 'http://', thereby making subsequent requests ignore the SSL proxy.

I feel your pain Fuseboxer. No disrespect because other than this I'm very happy with MU, but I honestly can't see why this is a "feature" of MU.

I suggest you take a look at these existing bug reports:

http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/901
http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/1105

The more people the add support for it (or ideally submit a patch), the more likely it is that this feature will be added.