Question

I am looking into a friend’s site which is really old and strange, and it has one thing really weird with it. If you go to the site here: http://www.crystalvine.com and click on “products” on the top menu, it takes you to the store’s home page which is set up in Magento.

Look at the url on that page. It is just an ip address. How could that be? Does anyone have any idea how to make it a domain name? I have access to the Magento account of that site, but can’t figure out how to make the actual url show up.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

1. Buy a domain name for that IP address. The site’s web host can help with that.
2. In Magento’s admin go to System > Configuration > Web and then in both the Secure and Unsecure sections are fields for the new domain name.
3. Anyone browsing to the IP address should now be automatically forwarded to the domain name but the original link won’t fix itself, users won’t notice but it can hurt SEO. Change that using whatever system is responsible for the origin site.

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In this case the various URL fields are reportedly blank, which should break things but does not. For future reference this is what they should be:

• Base URL A fully-qualified URL with scheme, domain name and trailing slash like http://shop.crystalvine.com/
• Base Link URL {{unsecure_base_url}}
• Base Skin URL {{unsecure_base_url}}skin/
• Base Media URL {{unsecure_base_url}}media/
• Base JavaScript URL {{unsecure_base_url}}js/

The secure section is the same but uses {{secure_base_url}} instead of {{unsecure_base_url}}.