WordPress – Setting correct Content-Type sent from WordPress, on Apache server

apache-2.2http-headersWordpress

I need help pointing me in the right direction for setting the ContentType returned by Apache for content produced by WordPress. I'm having trouble figuring out why WordPress is returning incorrect headers.

Issue

The specific problem is that our WordPress blog pages are being downloaded as a file rather than displayed by Internet Explorer and Chrome v21.

Content-Type: application/x-gzip is being returned by the server.

I'm told that I should expect Content-Type: text/html.

Background

The URL is http://www.bitesizeirishgaelic.com/blog/.

Best Answer

My host helped solve this in the end:

The most common causes for this behavior is an issue with the PHP handler or the AddHandler variable in an .htaccess file. I reset your PHP handler to suPHP, which it already was set to, and restarted Apache. That resolved the issue.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Strange HTTP response headers being sent to Internet Explorer 8 only

So I think I figured it out.

It appears that IE caches the AJAX GET data in such a way that it is hard (impossible?) to clear it out. Maybe I had the xml configured as text/xml at some point, but I don't think so. Basically, IE continued to use the cached results for that XML file over the actual server results. That also explains why the HTTP headers looked so odd (no server information for instance). Or it's possible that the cache is always producing text/html (I gave up further tests).

My solution: I added a '?avoidcache=' + a timestamp to the end of the URL in the GET request. Now IE gets the proper HTTP headers that I set on the server.

Wow do I hate Internet Explorer. How many development hours are wasted creating workarounds for it's horrible behavior?

How to get Apache2 to serve up .shtml files as Content-Type “text/html” and not “text.html”

There is probably a bad line somewhere else in the httpd.conf or one of the Included files. I would check the main configuration and others with grep to track this down.

grep Includes httpd.conf
grep text.html httpd.conf

Alternatively, you can force the type using FilesMatch. Here's an example:

<FilesMatch "\.(shtml)$">
   # type only
   ForceType text/html
   # type and character set
   # ForceType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
</FilesMatch>