Don’t Get Framed or Forwarded
We get a lot of email to our helpdesk from frantic pros and their customers – typically it’s about a customer who can’t complete the shopping cart, or can’t enter a password into a password protected gallery. Most always, this is caused by one of two things: your custom hostname is either “framed” or “forwarded.”
Framing displays your SmugMug page through a window on your registrar’s server, which prevents us from reading or writing user cookies. That means we can’t remember their gallery preferences, can’t keep them logged into password-protected galleries, and your shopping cart won’t work.
Forwarding has the same effect. Oftentimes, domain registrars will tell you “sure, we’ll forward www.mycoolname.com to www.smugmug.com, noooooo problemo!” Problemo. The only thing that SmugMug fully supports is CNAME aliasing. Some of the domain registrars make it very easy to implement CNAME forwarding, while with others it can be more enjoyable to spend a day having root canal.
If you need help with your domain registrar, we can usually help troubleshoot. Write us.
December 4th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but a really big issue is also the fact that Smugmug cannot do SSL encryption on a framed site. That means that any data that a user enters could be comprimised if the site is forwarded using frames. Do the frames extend into the shopping cart?
This really is a big deal and I can’t believe how many pros are out there that use frames for their forwarding. Privacy and security are massively important. I think it’ll be the first thing I check before I help someone out from now on.