Hi Ron, I really appreciate your reply and sorry I've taken so long to get back to you. I am still trying to resolve this issue. At the moment I'm more or less circumventing it.
Preferred Solution:
In short, I need to "Disable primary domain check." only for specific pages that I want to serve on the secure sub-domain OR enable primary domain check only for all HTTP (non-HTTPS) requests.
Current "not-so-great" Solution:
Hopefully my live example will help clarify the issue. For the moment, I have "Disable primary domain check." set to true. This allows us to access both http://golfglengarry.com AND https://glengarry.rtphq.com. I then use the plugin "WordPress HTTPS (SSL)" to do a few things:
- Force SSL on all admin pages
- Force any pages tagged as secure on golfglengarry.com to glengarry.rtphq.com
- Force a hard-coded list of shopping cart pages to be tagged as secure (as you can see if go to http://golfglengarry.com/catalogue/ it will auto-redirect you to https://glengarry.rtphq.com/catalogue/)
- Forces unsecure pages to use HTTP, but the page remains on the subdomain instead of forcing back to Primary domain.
In Summary:
At this point I can add canonical urls to each page that point at the Primary domain to help prevent any duplicate content issues, but then I still have the problem with our users visiting the site, checking out the online store, then returning to a non-secure page served on the sub-domain. It would be really nice if we could get there users looking at the Primary domain whenever possible.
Let me know what you think! Thank you for your time!