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Admin Tools

#16503 Avoid SSL for another domain

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 24 June 2013 04:38 CDT

activha
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: (2.5.11
PHP version: 5.4.15
MySQL version: 5.5.31
Host: http://activ-ha.com on AWS
Admin Tools version: 2.5.5

Description of my issue:
Hello
We use https on the website and have activated admin tools SEO convert all links to ssl which is working great.

However we work with two domains activ-ha.com and site113.com but we only have ssl certificate for the first one, the second one is used by our customers to get private websites.

The problem is that in our pages we have links to these private websites and these links are automatically converted also to SSL by admin tools, thus bringing certificate errors for our customers and their visitors.

Conversion is great for getting correct resources but it works also for CB fields related to the subdomains at site113.com and we would like to keep http only for these fields

Is there any way to have admin tools stop converting SSL for the domain site113.com and all linked subdomains as subdomain.site113.com ?

could it be by special rules in htaccess ? if yes could you help us on this ?

we tried several combinations without success so far.

Thanks a lot for helping

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Assuming that the two domains are not hosted on the same site, you need to disable the "Convert all links to HTTPS when site is accessed over SSL" option under Admin Tools' "SEO and Link Tools" page.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

activha
This is just a little more complicated, site113.com is only a virtual domain , just like an alias for customer pages, so yes it is hosted on the same site.

We would like to keep convert all links, as it helps with some components to keep our green bar :-)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
You can't have a non-SSL and an SSL site hosted on the same site and have one run on SSL and the other one not. SSL is all or nothing, even in Joomla! Global Configuration itself. You may disable forced SSL on your site, but you lose the green bar unless a user clicks on a forced SSL link or uses HTTPS when visiting your site. In so many words: it's complicated and a very bad idea; I tried it, I hated it, I moved to forced SSL throughout the site. Performance impact? Zero. None. Nada. If you don't want full SSL everywhere it's best to have a second small site for the extra domain name.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

activha
I understand and agree fully for the ssl part for the whole website :-)

Bu what we want to achieve is different, our users access the website through https://activ-ha.com/113/auteur/57 for instance (this is mine) in order to control what is displayed, then they have a public url which is http://jcmachuron.site113.com that they may give to their own customers.

This public url is only an alias and we use juvirtualdomain plugin to achieve this.

The problem is that on their CB pages, there is a link displaying this alias, and this link is displayed with Admin Tools as SSL : https://jcmachuron.site113.com

I only want this link to be displayed as http only, that's it. In order to give the proper non ssl url alias to our users and not the ssl one which will display a certificate warning.

But up to now I did not found a way to make it :-(

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
In so many words: what you are trying to achieve is infeasible due to the way SSL certificates, web servers and Joomla! work. You expect the same Joomla! site to be displayed in many different domain names, sometimes with SSL, sometimes without, one domain with SSL forced on, other domains with SSL forced off... Unless you start modifying Joomla! itself (which is a BAD idea) I can't see how you can achieve this.

Please note that what you describe has nothing to do with Admin Tools. Even if you disable the option I already mentioned and the respective force HTTPS URL options in the .htaccess Maker it's Joomla! itself that performs the SSL redirection. Hence you would need to modify Joomla! and end up with an unmaintainable site (unless you shed a lot of cash to it, of course).

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

activha
OK we changed the way we worked then, we bought two ssl certificates, one for activ-ha.com with extended validation and the other one with a wildcard for site113.com with apache SNI.

It seems to work fine this way with admin tools correcting the defective http link to https.

However we have a problem with iframes and external links. Some of our suppliers gave us links to their intranet in plain http that we include in our pages as external frames.
These links are then automatically converted by admin tools as https and then fail.
Is this feasible that admin tools would leave the iframe menu links as is and not change their protocol ?
Could you implement some exceptions in admin tools for chosen menu links ?

Thanks

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
you need to disable the "Convert all links to HTTPS when site is accessed over SSL" option under Admin Tools' "SEO and Link Tools" page.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

activha
Well, we would like to keep your convert all links to HTTPS, but except for iframe menu links, is this possible ? could you implement it ?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Even though it's possible I am not going to implement it. Right now we're doing a mass search and replace which is fast (< 10msec on most servers). Trying to parse the context of each link will make this 30 to 50 times slower which means that it is going to have a measurable performance impact on your entire site.

I would recommend turning off the "Convert all links to HTTPS when site is accessed over SSL" in Admin Tools. At the same time go to your site's Global Configuration, Server tab and set "Force SSL" to "Entire site". This should have almost the same effect (it issues a redirection if non-HTTPS access is detected).

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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