We had to rewrite some specific domain names in our WordPress multisite.
Most of our domains are on this form: something.w.uib.no
In our case that is nice, because we also have a valid ssl certificate which supports *.w.uib.no.
But in addition we have other domain names on the form: something.uib.no
which we don’t have a valid ssl cerificate. When a wordpress administrator tries to log in to:
* http://something.uib.no/wp-login
he/she is met with a scary ssl certificate warning. (Because we don’t have SSL certificates for these domain-names)
Our solution was to redirect this request with some Apache rewrite rules:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-login\.php [or]
Rewritecond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-admin$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(([^.])+\.b\.uib\.no)$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?uib\.no$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? https://%1w.uib.no%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
which says something like:
If REQUEST_URI starts with wp-login.php OR wp-admin, AND the HTTP_HOST (domainname) is NOT LIKE something.w.uib.no AND HTTP_HOST IS something.uib.no, THEN
rewrite the whole thing to a new URL with 301 (permanently moved). The %1, which is the match in the regular expression above is part of the new URL.
In this way we could make sure that the users of wordpress instances with http://something.uib.no, would be redirected to a proper domain name, and thus with a valid SSL certificate.
See also:
http://www.webforgers.net/mod-rewrite/mod-rewrite-syntax.php
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/articles/getting-started/general-help/apache-mod_rewrite-and-examples
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html (se: RewriteCond backreferences)
You might ask “Why not just order and install the SSL certificates as needed?”.
The answer is that ordering SSL certificates is a very manual process and takes a lot of administration and time, involving a lot of people. We want to avoid such and make things as simple as possible.