Updating the Favicon (URL address bar) in WordPress MU for the corporate brand
December 29th, 2008 by Dan YorkIf you use WordPress MU for a corporate blog portal, it’s natural to want it to look like other corporate websites and to be “branded” with the corporate logo wherever is appropriate. To that end, we have developed our own WordPress theme here that makes blogs.voxeo.com look more like www.voxeo.com and evolution.voxeo.com. We also have uploaded the “favicon.ico” file we use across our sites so that the URL in the address bar has the Voxeo logo:
Now I thought we had this all set up so that the favicon would survive across WordPress MU upgrades. We have the correct “favicon.ico” file in the two themes we use here (one for the blogs.voxeo.com “portal” page and one for the individual blogs). I thought we were all set.
So you can imagine my annoyance when after an upgrade a while back the favicon that was showing up was the default WPMU one:
The problem turned out to be the fact that WordPress MU has multiple favicon.ico files in the installation. A quick “find” brought me these:
wpmu/favicon.ico wpmu/wp-content/themes/default/favicon.ico wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-home/favicon.ico wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-default/favicon.ico
Our themes do, in fact, have the correct favicon.ico file, but it isn’t being used. The one file that seems to matter is the favicon.ico in the top level of my WPMU installation.
So the fix is trivial… just copy the favicon.ico from one of my themes up to the top level of my WPMU install. Ta da… problem fixed.
Of course, given the caching that web browsers do, the new favicon may not be visible in web browsers until either a refresh is forced or the browser’s cache is cleared. (I had to clear my cache in Firefox.) If users have also bookmarked the URLs in a browser such as Firefox, the favicons in their bookmark menus may not necessarily update. (In Firefox 3, there is a longer process you have to go through to change the bookmark favicons.)
In any event, new browsers connecting to your site should now see the correct favicon.
I didn’t try simply deleting the favicon.ico file at the top-level to see if that would cause WPMU to use the favicon.ico icons in the specific themes. In my case, I only want one favicon used across the entire site, so I’m okay replacing the top-level file.
Unfortunately, this appears to be yet one more step I need to add to my “WordPress MU Upgrade Checklist”…
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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, favicon
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January 20th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
How to handle the situation where wpmu will host multiple blogs in multiple domains? Is there a way for them to use different favicons, one per domain?
thanks
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
David,
Hmmm…. my apologies for missing your comment when it came in back in January. I don’t know about using multiple favicons with different blogs in different domains. My guess would be that you could use a different favicon in each theme, so if you used a different theme for each domain you could have a different favicon. That’s just a guess… I’ve not tried it… but based on what I know of WordPress MU, that would be how I would see it working.
Thanks for the comment and, again, my apologies on the delay in replying, Dan