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Switching to https:// (SSL or TLS)

Author: Edward Hardin Reference Number: AA-00737 Views: 10628 Last Updated: 06/18/2013 02:07 PM

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This article list all potential issues of switching your knowledge base to https:// protocol and provides solutions to them.

First of all you should know that switching to https should be done on the server level. You need to install a security certificate on it and setup certain settings. This part of the setup is outside the scope of this guide, since there are hundreds of different platforms and each has its own way of enabling https. For details on that please consult your hosting documentation.

Once you have enabled https KMP automatically starts working via secure protocol. There is only one thing you need to do to with the knowledgebase to finish transition from http to https - you need to fix links to images embedded to your articles.

Fix links to images and videos

Images in the knowledge base articles are referenced via http links by default, so you'll be warned by your web browser that part of the content is "insecure" because it loads via http while you're viewing a secure https page.

The solution is simple and consists from two steps:

1. Run one of the following queries against the KMP database.

This one is for MySQL database type:

update faq_articles set answer = replace(answer, 'http://website.com/admin/media_store/2/', 'https://website.com/admin/media_store/2/') WHERE account_id=2;

This is one is for MSSQL

UPDATE faq_articles SET answer = cast(replace(cast(answer as nvarchar(max)),'http://website.com/admin/media_store/2/','https://website.com/admin/media_store/2/') as ntext) WHERE account_id=2;

It will update all image and video references with now correct https:// URL.

Please note that "faq_articles" in the aforementioned query is the default table name in KMP. If you're using a table prefix, you would need to add it before "faq_articles", e.g. "prefixfaq_articles".

2. Make sure that everyone uses the knowledge base via https, especially when they add images to it, to ensure that all images added in the future would be referenced correctly.

Below you can find a list of known issues related to https and solutions to them.

Linux-specific Issues

Lost images in exported PDF on https sites

Exported PDF file may have broken images if you're using Knowledgebase Manager Pro via https://

It happens because the wkhtmltopdf library that generates PDF files may not be able to access images via https links.

To resolve this please install "openssl-devel" package on the server (Linux). There are no reported issues of this kind on Windows systems.