Support Forum

It's the site linked to my profile: http://www.lion-pack.nl

Actually, we are using W3 total cache plugin. Enabled: Page cache (not for logged in members), browser cache expires headers, object cache and CDN (self-hosted).

Had to disable the eTag, pragma and cache-control browser cache headers to get the forum to work (they're no use anyways and eTags based on hardware id's don't work well when using multiple servers like we do with CDN).

I made the change to sp-control.php you requested, the output was being overlapped with the admin bar in the top. Also it broke the wp-admin page (fonts were bigger and some options didn't work anymore), so I removed it again. The output underneath (checked the page source) was https= ssl=. So nothing was echo'd. I'd expect either true or false... I'll add the lines again the next time I notice the permalink has changed and see what it outputs then.

The caches have been purged (multiple times) since. Also, like you said, I've set W3TC to never cache the lion-pack.nl/forum page. The CDN does host the files in wp-content/sp-resources/*, but this is no dynamic content.

I did where I could (page cache and object cache). Also, the problem occurred when I disabled the w3tc cache plugin in my own trouble-shooting as well.

Yesterday morning I saw it had switched to https again (those lines still echo'd nothing btw). I had no time because I had to leave, so I didn't 'fix' it with the manual backup method. When I returned home that afternoon it had switched back to http on itself again. Since then it has stuck and did not switch to https since. Fixed?

I did:

- Add force ssl false and force admin false statements to wp-config.

- Remove the /wp-content/sp-resources/* from the CDN (content delivery netwrok) and only added the forum-laguage, forum-avatars, and our forum-theme from the sp-resources. Apparently some forum-plugins, like the tinyMCE editor, did not like being hosted on a CDN (which resulted in blank popups when clicking the 'add image', 'add link' buttons)

- Update the forum to the latest version (today's release).

It did it again today. is_ssl again returned nothing. It appears it's wordpress's fault in a way. Apparently Wordpress has been developed on/for an IIS server. The function is_ssl is writen in such a way that on an Apache server (like ours) it isn't always working properly (and the logic in the function means it default to TRUE...explains a lot, doesn't it?)

Fix for people running an APACHE based server:

Change the is_ssl() function in wp-includes/functions.php around lines 3698 - 3708 to:

function is_ssl() {
        if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ) {
                #if ( 'on' == strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) )
                        return true;
                #if ( '1' == $_SERVER['HTTPS'] )
                #return true;
        #} elseif ( isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']) && ( '443' == $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] ) ) {
        #       return true;
        }
        return false;
}

source: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/ssl-enabled-by-default-for-loginadmin-how-to-remove#post-1262680

After I made this change the permalink changed back to http again.