WordPress MU

I looked up several topics about keep www instead drop them. I tried to follow their information and still not working. Im posting this now to see if anyone has the most recent solution even from WORDPRESS crew, too.

The reason to keep www is to be consistency with our viewers to remember the urls instead confuse our viewers without www or with www. Let me know about it asap!

Jed

www is deprecated. I'd suggest dropping it all together, everywhere.

Granted, still accept traffic via the www subdomain, just silently redirect it to the real domain without the need for the sub.

I'm having the same problem. And please note: Some people just *can't* get rid of the www part, because they don't administer the server or they don't get to decide if they wan't to use it or not. In my case I even have an address like:

http://www.word.domain.tld

and in the end, i'd like to use

http://www.word.domain.tld/blogs

as the root blog address. and

http://www.word.domain.tld/blogs/someblog1
http://www.word.domain.tld/blogs/someblog2

for the individual blogs. So "www is deprecated" is just not the answer to the question.

Thanks for any help.

I guess you've tried deleting the 'www' rewrite in htaccess? Might work for sub directory Mu's, haven't tried it myself as 'www' is actually deprecated nowadays. If not you could always move to a more up to date provider that doesn't enforce www for your root domain. A move could very well result in less pain than trying to get Mu to work on your current server.

Unfortunately I can't move my provider nor my server, since I'm at university (believe me, I don't like the www prefix either). And as a small institute we can't force the whole university, to change its URL scheme, which is dictated by the IT center of the university.

So what to do? It seems like a lot about these www things are hardcoded into wpmu, not only into htaccess. And I don't like hacking the standard files since that would complicate the updating process, which I can't risk.

I also don't understand why during the installation process it is asked, which URL one wants to use and then it strips every "www" entered all the same??

IMHO, such things like deprecating www shouldn't be dictated by the software but by discourse.

I'd try installing it and then editing the database like we currently suggest for the reversed domains. Link.

Not sure if you would have to do editing within the files though. There may be calls elsewhere within the files. I don't see any right off. (There's on one the index-install.php file but thatdoesn't come into play after you install.) If there are, I'm sure you'll hit them fairly quickly.

And we had a thread here two months ago where we proved a university had something set up incorrectly and it got fixed quickly without them admiting that they had it wrong. :)

Why not just install it on a real subdomain, if you're going to use a subdirectory install anyway.

Then have something like blogs.whatever.tld/username/

Much better, and less hassle in the long run.

That would work.

Unless IT is sticking on 'www' to that as well.

Forgive me for my naivety, but I'm setting up a system as well. I've chosen to use SUBDIRECTORIES for this very reason - to keep url consistency among the clientele. That being said, I didn't have to do much to achieve this. After installing MU to use SUBDIRECTORIES, I created a 2nd a-record (non-www) to point to the blog server. This works here just fine. I wonder if your IT dept can create a non-www a-record for you in their DNS?

andy-

I would hope they have one by default. You'd be VERY surprised how much traffic a site can miss without it.

That's the normal method. My read of thise thread is that they don't have a 'non-www' setup.

That's exactly the problem. I can't get rid of the 'www' because there's already another site (the main site in Typo3) installed on the server, which relies on it. And I can't afford to break this site.

hagmann - use blogs.mydomain.com instead?

ehm? But that wouldn't solve the 'www' problem would it? Please note that I have a URL of the form:

http://www.word.domain.tld

and I can't get rid of the 'www.word' part! And because the main site is running under this URL (which is *not* a wordpress install), and I can't use other subdomains, I want to install WPMU under

http://www.word.domain.tld/blogs/

and use subdirectories. I hope everything is clear now?

What happens if you ping word.domain.tld ? Does it resolve?
There's no virtual host listening on word.domain.tld? That's *really* short sighted of your IT people.

Unfortunately you're stuck. URLs are stored internally without the www for reasons of consistency. Sorry about that.

That actually would be a broken DNS setup if you were required to use http://www.word.domain.tld. The 'word' is suppose to take the place of the 'www' bit. They're called machine names. They don't coexist. A large portion of the net and most search engine spiders couldn't see the site. There's an RFC even on the subject I believe.

Not that that would matter to your IT department probably. *sigh*

What Donncha is saying is the 'word' part should take the place of the 'www' bit. Please try it.

OK. I'll try to figure it out with the IT Department. Thanks all for your help!

You know what, I'm kicking myself. I realized this on the way home last night.

Comment out this line before you install it. That's the call to strip out the 'www' bit. You may have to do the fix I linked to above but that should work.

The philosophy of promoting change by hardcoding it into mu is proving effective..

This is one of the golden questions, perhaps it is best left unanswered here. The victory at the end seems more potent when you are one of the few who managed to wade through volumes of pages to find that magic hint buried in a comment.

I ran into the same problem and this is what I did to fix it on fooqu.com:

I went into the database itself and changed the values for source_domain, siteurl and home. Those can be changed in:

Table wp_usermeta | Field: source_domain
Table wp_1_options | Field: siteurl
Table wp_1_options | Field: home

In the case of wp_1_options I am assuming that is always the main site's table for all MU installations. Every other blog created at blogname.yourdomain.xxx will have a wp_X_options table. If your problem is like mine and you want the main site yourdomain.com to use http://www.yourdomain.com, you need to make the changes to the wp_X_options that relates to the main site. Again I'm only assuming it's wp_1_options for all installations.

Do not include the www in table wp_blogs field domain or table wp_site field domain because anyone with a blog at blogname.yourdomain.com won't be able to access their dashboard.

There might be a better fix but I wasn't able to find it. This fix is working for me. I hope it helps you.