Resolving mixed content errors with WordPress

This blog has in theory been available via a secure (“https“) connection for about 2 years. I say “in theory” because some of the images were being loaded from insecure connections which meant there still ways to easily circumvent that security. After some digging it seems this is a long-standing known problem with the WordPress software that runs this blog, and despite some recent activity, still not fixed in last week’s 4.0 release.

Fortunately the discussion in the bug report does provide a one-line workaround. There was no advice on where to put that one liner, so I decided to write a plugin as it would then be easy to toggle on and off if required.


The next challenge was that the instapress plugin I had been using to display my Instagram photographs in the side bar was also using insecure content. It seems that instapress is no longer supported, and although worked for me, might not continue to work for much longer so I upgraded to Simple Instagram. This was a straightforward drop-in replacement (once I had successfully made an Instagram developer account) but displayed three Instagrams per row which I found a bit small. The author appears to be very active and helpful on the forums, providing these hints on how to customise it, but initially I could not get this to work for me when I put the settings in my custom theme’s style.css. The problem is that the first CSS class is now .si_feed_list and I found I needed to mark the customisation as !important in order to override the default.

/* For use with the Simple Instagram plugin */
.si_feed_list .si_item {
  width: 50% !important;
}

Finally I had to disable the Simple Facebook Connect plugin. Like instapress, this was reported as being broken and discontinued by the author.