HAving to user WWW. in front of site URL address

[Digital Cipher]

Hi all

Has anyone found the reason and a solution to why i have to use www. in front of my site url, two problems i have found are you cannot login to the back office and the cart looses the contents when you select another product or re fresh my browser.

Browsers = IE7 & FF3 (Opera works fine)

Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
PHP Version 5.1.6
MySQL 5
Host = Easyspace.com

Can anyone help

[jhnstcks]

Add the followin code to your .htaccess file. replacing example.com with your domain name.

It will redirect anyone without the www prefix to the address using www.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com[nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

[Digital Cipher]

I added the following code and still the same, it does not redirect

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^woods-furniture.co.uk[nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.woods-furniture.co.uk/$1 [r=301,nc]

[jhnstcks]

Well it works on 2 of my sites, so no idea why it doesnt work on yours.

[Paul C]

I added the following code and still the same, it does not redirect

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^woods-furniture.co.uk[nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.woods-furniture.co.uk/$1 [r=301,nc]

There are two possible reasons I can think of, one easy to fix and the other... not.

1) Try changing the above code to:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^woods-furniture\.co\.uk[nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.woods-furniture.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

It appears that not escaping the '.' in the match string can cause problems with some hosts.

2) You need to find out if the apache mod_rewrite module is installed for your hosting package. If not then you can't do this, or you need to urge your host to implement it, or you need to change hosting company

Paul

[Digital Cipher]

Hi again

I have tried

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^woods-furniture\.co\.uk[nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.woods-furniture.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

but still fails to work, after running a phpinfo mod_rewrite is loaded on the host server

Is there any thing else i can try?

[Paul C]

One last shot, then I'm beat

This assumes that your store is in the root of your site.

#Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^woods-furniture\.co\.uk[NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.woods-furniture.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] 

Paul

[Digital Cipher]

Hi Paul

Cheers for the fast responce, changed the .htaccess file as above, still no luck, im i right the .htaccess file permissions is 0755 or is it 0644

anyway cheers for trying, can anyone else shed light on this problem.

[Digital Cipher]

sorted it !!!!

Big thanks to paulc & jhnstcks for pointing me in the right direction, after a bit of google i found this works

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]