Hi,
Thank you for your suggestions.
* Since I could not use the manager I went directly into the users table and changed the 'sudo' field for my user from 0 to 1. Then with an FTP client I deleted everything from the core/cache folder because I wasn't sure whether the users table is cached. I also deleted all domain, path and session cookies in Firefox. Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem. Everything behaved like before.
* I'm using a non-www domain, so I uncommented that part of .htaccess so it looks like this:
# Rewrite www.domain.com -> domain.com -- used with SEO Strict URLs plugin
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mydomain\.de [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://mydomain.de/$1 [R=301,L]
I cleared all cookies again and the whole cache folder. This did not help, either.
* Just for the sake of completeness I uncommented the second part (by putting back the comment on the first) so it looked like this:
# or for the opposite domain.com -> www.domain.com use the following
# DO NOT USE BOTH
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mydomain\.de [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://mydomain.de/$1 [R=301,L]
Again, I cleared all cookies and the whole cache folder. I got an error in Firefox that 'the page is not redirected properly. The server redirects your request in a way that will never be fulfilled'.
Do you perhaps have any other suggestion?
Another question is, if I have the www and non-www redirection problem, and I inspect all HTTP requests with Firebug during logon, should I be able to see a www domain in one request and a non-www in another? I'm asking because I checked this and for all requests I see the non-www domain.
However, there is one interesting thing I can see in Firebug. After I click on the login button on the initial login screen a POST request is made to '
http://mydomain.de/manager/'. This contains my username and password in the POST data and the returnUrl parameter with the value '/manager/'. The server returns with response 302 (Moved Temporarily) and the Location in the response is '
http://mydomain.de/manager' (final slash is missing!). The response also contains my PHPSESSID cookie with the same value which is stored in my session table, and it is for my non-www domain.
After this, Firefox sends a GET request to '
http://mydomain.de/manager' sending my PHPSESSID cookie. This time it gets a 301 (Moved Permanently) response with the Location '
http://mydomain.de/manager/' (final slash is there, again!). After the request to '
http://mydomain.de/manager/' it finally gets a 200 (OK) response and the HTML code of the manager page.
Is this normal that first I'm redirected to a page without slash and then back to a page with slash?