Loading WordPress From index.php

One of WordPress’ strengths is its attention to SEO-related issues in its core files. One of those issues is the problem of having the home page of the blog indexed twice in the search engines; once under the actual address, http://domain-name.com/index.php, and the other as the plain domain name: http://domain-name.com. Note that this is a different problem than the trailing slash problem ( http://domain-name.com/ vs. http://domain-name.com ) which WordPress also takes care of.

WordPress handles the index.php problem by rewriting requests for http://domain-name.com/index.php to http://domain-name.com. All well and good, and beneficial for most sites.

But that rewriting/redirecting caused some problems on a site I was working on yesterday, and once I figured out how, it was a relatively easy fix.

Here’s what happened: a client had me upgrade an old installation of SemioLogic’s version of WordPress to genuine WordPress. While it can be time-consuming, switching over is a fairly straightforward process most of the time. The challenge here was that while most of the site is normal .html files, WordPress is installed at the root level, and is not actually serving the ‘home’ page of the site.

So you can maybe see where this is headed: the ‘home’ page of the site is index.html. That’s what comes up when you ask for http://domain-name.com. The server is set to look for index.html first, then index.php if index.html isn’t there. So to get to the blog, you had to ask for http://domain-name.com/index.php.

But when you asked for index.php, WordPress, being the dutiful SEO-friendly software that it is, stripped off “index.php” from the request, and redirected to http://domain-name.com.

The server saw the request for the site index file and promptly served up index.html. So you couldn’t get to the home page of the blog. If you had a specific post URL and typed it in, it worked fine.

Easy fix, says I. Settings -> General, change the WordPress url to http://domain-name.com/index.php from http://domain-name.com.

Oops. Now all the permalinks have ‘index.php/’ prepended: http://domain-name.com/index.php/i-want-this-post. Not good, and not intended, especially as the site has been indexed in Google without the index.php in there.

I never did figure out how SemioLogic handled this; obviously it was working before the changeover. Undoubtedly there was an easy setting that disappeared once the SL files were gone. I can only think this issue had come up before and the author of SL provided a workaround.

Thankfully, the coders of WordPress also recognized that there may be a time when rewriting URLs wasn’t good so they provided a filter to disable or alter the rewrite. Once I found that notation in includes/canonical.php, the fix was a breeze. Write a plugin that disables the redirect to / when /index.php is called for. Here is the entire plugin:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Index.php fix
Plugin URI: http://ilikewordpress.com/loading-wordpress-from-index-php
Description: This plugin allows a blog installed at root to be addressed by /index.php. Remedies stripping of filename by includes/canonical.php
Author: Steve Johnson
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://ilikewordpress.com/
*/

/*
*    Applies filter to redirect_canonical to defeat
*    stripping of index.php file
*/

function fix_index( $requested_url ) {
 if ( get_bloginfo( 'url' ) == $requested_url )
 return false;
}
add_filter( 'redirect_canonical', 'fix_index' );

?>

And that’s all there is to it. Now when a browser asks for ‘index.php’, that’s what it gets instead of a redirection to /.

You could also put this in the functions.php file of a theme, but obviously it wouldn’t work if the theme were changed.

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Tagged as: duplicate content, index files, url rewriting, wordpress redirect