Cross-reference to a MediaWiki website's URL partially not working

Question

In words: I developed a website with MediaWiki 1.22.5 (PHP 5.3.3 (apache2handler), SQLite 3.6.20 with full-text search support) and now it's public through, say, www.example1.com/~myname/mediawiki/index.php/website_name. The website has both a public and a private area (accessible with login).

Now, I register the website but under another domain, say, www.example2.com, by making a cross-reference associated with the new domain. The problem is that, if I go on www.example2.com I can surf on the public pages, but not all of them: for instance, when I click on the login button, as well as on the private pages, nothing happens, I just remain on the same page.

Any suggestion please?

P.S.: Sorry, if I do not provide other info, I'm not an expert in web development, but if you ask to provide more specific info I'll be glad to do it.

Answer 1

Since this is a webmastering site (and not really a site for web development), I'm gonna make a few suggestions that may help from a website troubleshooter perspective:

Check the cookies. If on the original site, cookies are attached to the domain and you move the site from domain to domain, then no login information will be saved.

Here's an example of a cookie header outputted from a site:

Set-Cookie: A=1;path=/;domain=www.example1.com;expires=Thu, 22 Oct 2015 21:30:27 GMT

It sets a cookie with a name "A" equal to "1" on www.example1.com anywhere on the site starting at the root folder and the cookie expires on October 22nd.

If this was outputted when a page is requested from www.example2.com then the cookie wouldn't apply because the domains do not match.

See https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt for more info on how cookies should be setup for proper operation.

The next thing you need to do is check all hyper links in your HTML that you output. All absolute URLs must be updated. For example, if your HTML initially contained this:

<a href="http://www.example1.com/something">Do something</a>

Then you'll need to change it to:

<a href="http://www.example2.com/something">Do something</a>