Or you could just regenerate the icons which will then be updated with the correct absolute URL.
Since moving to SSL is usually a one time event I didn’t want to add the overhead of checking for it on every page load.
No – only part of the site is SSL, so I can’t just regenerate the icons.
And there is no real overhead. No database calls, no redirects – you just need to get the protocol and domain for the current website once, and create an alternative with SSL flipped, and then if the link starts with the same string you do nothing, and if it equals the alternative you flip it.
Its a tiny amount of CPU to achieve this.
Otherwise, the icons just won’t work on some browsers.
Security best practice these days is to enable SSL on all your pages.
You could generate the icons with SSL and they would work on both of course.
Well, most wordpress admins won’t spot the problem themselves and will not know that there is a problem with their SSL implementation until an end user spots that they are not getting a padlock symbol and reports it rather than simply going elsewhere to buy products.
I know that this is a free plugin, and support is therefore on a best efforts basis – and I would certainly understand if you said you didn’t have the time to fix this straight away, but I would certainly rather have a proper fix than an undocumented workaround.
Would it help if I code the fix for you?
Oh – and security best practice does NOT require you to use SSL on every site. Security best practice is to use SSL whenever a web site has a logon or is holding personal data, but when it is public information you are displaying with no passwords or personal data, it is nowhere near as important.
That’s old security best practice, these days, with the amount of information leaded just in HTTP headers, all sites should be fully SSL enabled.
Most WP Admins will just enable SSL on their entire site and never see the difference, those that go to mixed sites are typically more savvy and will work out the difference.
I’ll add a FAQ question about it so it gets documented, but I don’t intend to add or support a mixed site environment with this plugin.