EDIT: I THINK I FIXED MY PROBLEM. SO YOU CAN IGNORE THIS THREAD NOW
sorry, this is long, but its otherwise hard to explain...
So i've built this fairly complex template website system that lets several different affiliates of an organization set up their own website off of one templated site. Basically, all the individual domain names point to the one site and then, the site determines which content to load based on the domain name. For most of the site I'm just using PHP's $_SERVER array to figure out the domain name and this works great.
I've also added some mod rewrite rules in an .htaccess file to mask where each site's files are stored. Basically, each affiliate gets their own folder for images, PDF's and other downloadable content. These folders are all aliased so that, looking at the html code, you can't tell the site is part of the template system.
In other words, the folder
/sites/some-affiliates-website.com/images/ looks like
/media/images.
the code to do this looks like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^media(.*)$ /sites/%1/$1 [QSA,L]this works great.
Here's where it gets tricky...
Since some affiliates that are joining this system already have a site with their domain name pointing to it - or they may not have procured their domain name yet, I've had to set up a way to allow them to build/view their website without looking for a domain name in the url.
I've created a subdomain off the main site (
http://staging.rebuildingtogetheraffiliates.org) which then lets the user enter their (eventual) domain name and it sets a cookie that the PHP script uses to load content (instead of a domain name in the url)
and this works great as well. Of course, that only solves the PHP side of things. the
/media/ alias doesn't work so I've added a line to the htaccess script:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} stagingdomain=(.*) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^media(.*)$ /sites/%1/$1 [QSA,L]So now, htaccess is looking for the cookie first, if its there, it add the alias. if it not, it works the way it did before.
this works too!
But here's the bug. SOMETIMES when I go to an affiliates site and don't add the "www" in the url, the images in the
/media/ alias don't show up. But sometimes they do.
The demo site I've built for test uses the .com version of the system's domain name:
http://www.rebuildingtogetheraffiliates.com always workshttp://rebuildingtogetheraffiliates.com sometimes workshttp://staging.rebuildingtogetheraffiliates.org (then enter "rebuildingtogetheraffiliates.com") -
always worksSo here's were I'm looking for some help/advice or whatever.1) when you go to the site with and without the "www" do all the images always appear?
2) what if you log into the staging site and then go back to the .com site? (the cookie is for the .org domain so I don't know why it would matter, but who knows?)
3) looking at my htaccess code, what can I change to fix this problem? I was thinking I could just force the "www" but I can't always force it because sometimes in needs to be "staging."
