Using ExpressionEngine with CDN

Question

As the title says, looking for the best way to integrate a cdn with EE.

I currently have a cdn account with MaxCDN and my solutions was to change the site_url within the configuration site to my cname address http://cdn.mysite.com.

From there I added a global variable and named it {root_url} that was my sites original address http://www.mysite.com.

Then just went and changed all menu links and such to use the global variable instead of the {site_url}.

This does work, however where I'm running into problems is the pagination. The pagination uses the site_url, which is now the cdn.

How are other people using a cdn with their EE install? Is there a better solution? Although this works, it seems clunky to me. Would really like to get some others advice/perspective.

I've been able to relate previous and next entries as well when viewing a blog post for example using this:

<ul class="pager">
  {exp:channel:prev_entry channel="blog"}
  <li class="previous">
    <a href="{root_url}blog/view/{url_title}">&larr; {title}</a></a>
  </li>
  {/exp:channel:prev_entry}
  {exp:channel:next_entry channel="blog"}
  <li class="next">
    <a href="{root_url}blog/view/{url_title}">{title} &rarr;</a> 
  </li>
  {/exp:channel:next_entry}
</ul>

But I've not been able to figure out how to change the pagination links to use the same {root_url} prefix. It seems you can completely customize the output and look of the pagination but not the links?

Answer 1

So I figured it out by "hacking" the Pagination library in the CodeIgnitor core.

Upside: it works

Downside: need to re-apply hack after EE updates

If someone knows of a better solution I'd love to know!! Especially being as I'm a novice in PHP I don't know if this is the preferred way to accomplish this. With that said, here's what I did to overwrite the pagination URL's when using a CDN address for the {site_url}

Go to system > codeignitor > system > libraries > Pagination.php

Then on lines 242 - 254 (on version 2.4.0 of EE anyway) you would replace this:

if ($this->CI->config->item('enable_query_strings') === TRUE OR $this->page_query_string === TRUE)
{
    $this->base_url = rtrim($this->base_url).'&'.$this->query_string_segment.'=';
}
else
{
    $this->base_url = rtrim($this->base_url, '/') .'/';
}

// And here we go...
$link_array = array();

$first_url = ($this->first_url == '') ? $this->base_url : $this->first_url;

With this:

if ($this->CI->config->item('enable_query_strings') === TRUE OR $this->page_query_string === TRUE)
{
    $this->base_url = str_replace("cdn","www",(rtrim($this->base_url).'&'.$this->query_string_segment.'='));
}
else
{
    $this->base_url = str_replace("cdn","www",(rtrim($this->base_url, '/') .'/'));
}

// And here we go...
$link_array = array();

$first_url = str_replace("cdn","www",(($this->first_url == '') ? $this->base_url : $this->first_url));

Answer 2

Have you tried the paginate_base parameter? You should be able to override the URL through this.