CUNY Academic Commons

Also, the commons site should be masked as http://www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365. If that could be done at the same time, it would be important as well. The site will launch publicly on Wednesday. JJG

Jen Jack Gieseking wrote:

Hi.

In an effort to mask our domain, I incorrectly domain mapped justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu to www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365. The site www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365 is already domain mapped to that commons url so it's stuck in a loop. I need a super admin to undo my mistake please.

Thank you.
Jen

Jen Jack Gieseking wrote:

Also, the commons site should be masked as http://www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365. If that could be done at the same time, it would be important as well. The site will launch publicly on Wednesday. JJG

Hi Jen --

Two things:

1. For the domain mapping to work, we need to work with IT -- both the originating domain and the target have to be set up for this. That's what IT was working on today.

2. Can I ask you to keep one issue per ticket? It helps avoid confusion. Many thanks!

I've deleted the incorrectly mapped address, so the site is once again accessible at http://www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365, which redirects to http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

I'm afraid that at this time it's not possible to map a URL like www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365 onto a Commons blog. Domain mapping is available for URLs like example.com or test.example.com, but not URLs like example.com/test.

Thanks, Boone.

I'm afraid that at this time it's not possible to map a URL like www.gc.cuny.edu/justpublics365 onto a Commons blog.

Are you sure about that? Is the problem on the Commons/WordPress side or on the GC IT side? Can you elaborate?

The domain mapping plugin requires that A or CNAME records be pointed at the Commons's IP address, so that Apache can do the necessary rewrites. Subdirectories like /justpublics365 do not have separate DNS records. It may be possible for us to write custom rewrite rules, but it can't be done in the context of domain mapping.

Boone is right that domain mapping isn't the recipe here, but what's needed is a reverse proxy.

Charbel and I are working on this now. Hang in there...

Okay -- thanks, guys.

Ok, Charbel and I have setup a reverse proxy for this on a test server and it mostly works.

The one small gotcha is with how the URLs are constructed in WP.
Boone, please shed some light, it seems that WP is adding a trailing slash to URIs like:

justpublics365.gc.cuny.edu/blog gets rewritten as justpublics365.gc.cuny.edu/blog/

What purpose does that serve? Can it safely be disabled for this individual site?

WP adds the trailing slash as part of its canonical URL schema. It wants to make sure that every resource is available at a single URI, and it so happens that WP opts to make its canonical URI have the slash.

This step in the canonical process can be removed, but it's not trivial for me to do so. Is it something you can easily work around on your end? If not, no sweat, I will take care of it on mine.

Thanks, Boone. I believe we can wrangle IIS into always adding the trailing slash, but have failed on our first attempts. Will give it another run now...

I just wanted to chime in here while Andre is working on the IIS reverse proxy.

Boone,

Doesn't this issue also have to do with multisite subdomain versus subdirectory installs? You can setup WP to serve sites via a subdomain OR a subdirectory but not both?

Subdomain: site.example.com
Subdirectory: example.com/site

So I think this issue would require a custom server setup like Andre discusses above because our MS setup is for subdomains not subdirectories, right?

Dom - No, that shouldn't matter. What's important is that something is in charge of rewriting URLs. Domain mapping does it on the WP end, but that won't work for our purposes. A reverse proxy will allow the Commons to serve the pages as it normally would, but to have the proxy rewrite the URL that the user sees in the location bar. In each case, it's just a matter of matching and replacing base URLs using regular expressions.

Ah, and I just noticed something that I missed. The site on our install is justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu. But the original request is to remap this domain to a gc.cuny.edu address. This isn't part of our WP subdomain so there would be no way (or it would be very difficult) for our WP install to rewrite this domain. Which I guess is why we need Andre to setup the reverse proxy, this rewrite is much more complex than a simple "Domain Mapping." It's not a "map" it's truly a complete URL Rewrite?

We have finished successfully testing the reverse proxy on a test server. Now we are coming up with a method for pushing this to production , where the environment is a bit more complex because it's behind a load balancer and has a CMS (Kentico) installed on the root folder.

Oh I forgot to mention one gotcha. In order to get this to work I had to disable content compression on the commons website. There may be a way to disable this for that sub-domain only but I'm not sure yet.

Is the issue in this ticket all wrapped up?