To www or not to www?

Thanks to Rusty Smith for answering this question on the mailing list. I’ve added a shorter version to the FAQ.

To get to my url, the user doesn’t have to type the “www” as part of the url name so I had the name listed without it. However, most Internet users still generally type in the “www” as part of the web address. I was hoping that the plugin would work whether the “www” was listed in the url or not. Guess I will make sure the “www” is listed in the WordPress configuration since that is what would generally be typed in.

Is this something that might be fixed in a future release? Whether the url has the “www” in the name should be invisible to the end user and hopefully shouldn’t impact how a plugin works.

Brian and others that run into this problem:
This is NOT an EventCalendar problem, it actually breaks WordPress, but most people do not realize it. If you want to see how it breaks WordPress, log in to your blog at www.yourblog.com and then go to yourblog.com (or vice versus) and you will see that you are no longer logged in. You should decide whether you want www or not (I have no dog in the fight, but you may want to check out no-www.org to hear from folks that do). Then you paste the following lines into your .htaccess file, changing the domain name to match that of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\\.domain\\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This should silently redirect any call to www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com without the www. An added benefit is that any inbound link to your site will redirect as well, which makes the searchbots see your site as one instead of two, which should theoretically increase your popularity for those that worry about such things.

The above works on apache servers, but if you are installed on a windows IIS machine you may have to install any of the various plugins that do a similar redirect. I have not tried them, but give them a shot and report back. They may only work on apache servers as well. IIS probably has some sort of redirect capabilities, maybe someone knows how to do that?

This entry was posted in Documentation. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply