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The Obvlo Microsite plugin serves your guides under your own domain — yourhotel.com/local-guides/paris — so the SEO value accrues to your site. It is the same reverse proxy described in Reverse proxy, packaged as a plugin. On any server that allows .htaccess rewrites — which is most of them, and all the common managed WordPress hosts — there is no server config to edit, no shell access and no restart: the plugin sets up its own path and then checks that it really works. Where a server does not allow them, no plugin can serve these URLs, and the one requirement below says how to tell.
If you run WordPress, this is the mode we recommend. You get everything the reverse proxy gives you — publishing live within seconds, new pages appearing on their own — without touching a server config file. Deployment modes compares it against the alternatives.

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Before you start: one server requirement

The plugin needs your server to let .htaccess files set up rewrites. On Apache that means two things: mod_rewrite enabled, and AllowOverride set to allow it — normally AllowOverride All.
If AllowOverride is None, the plugin cannot work. Apache then never reads .htaccess at all, so the rule the plugin writes is ignored and your guides return a 404. This is not something the plugin, or any WordPress plugin, can work around from inside WordPress — the request is refused before PHP ever runs.
You almost certainly already meet this requirement. It is the same thing that makes WordPress’s pretty permalinks work, so there is a one-second check: if your posts have URLs like yoursite.com/my-post/, your server allows .htaccess rewrites and the plugin will work. If your posts look like yoursite.com/?p=123 or yoursite.com/index.php/my-post/, they do not — fix that first, and see When guide URLs stay unreachable.

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Install

1

Download the plugin from the portal

Open your site in the Obvlo portal, go to the Integration tab, choose WordPress plugin and download the archive.It arrives already configured for your site. There is no org id, site id or origin to type in, and nothing to substitute by hand.
2

Upload and activate

In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the .zip, install, then activate.
3

Check the settings screen

Go to Settings → Obvlo Microsite. Guide URLs reachable should say Yes — the plugin checks this by requesting one of your guide URLs, so it is reporting what a visitor would actually get.That is the whole installation. You do not need shell access, and nothing outside your own site folder is touched.
4

Visit your guides

Open the path the portal generated the plugin for, e.g. https://yourhotel.com/local-guides/. Your Obvlo content loads on your own domain.
If your guides return a 404, the settings screen will tell you why. The row Guide URLs reachable is checked by actually requesting one, not by guessing — so it reflects what a visitor would get. If it says no, use the Add the rule and re-check button on that screen.

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How the guide path reaches the plugin

Your web server has to hand /local-guides/paris to WordPress before the plugin can answer it. Otherwise the server looks for a file or folder of that name, does not find one, and returns its own 404 without ever loading WordPress. On most sites WordPress’s own rule already does this — it is the same rule that makes your post URLs work. Where it does not, the plugin adds one line of its own to the .htaccess file in your site folder, claiming only your guide path:
Nothing else on your site is affected: your post URLs, your permalink setting and any other rules in that file are left exactly as they were, and the block is removed again if you deactivate the plugin. A guide that does not exist gets your own theme’s 404 page, on your own domain.

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When guide URLs stay unreachable

If Guide URLs reachable still says no after the plugin has written its rule, the rule is being ignored. The plugin has done everything it can from inside WordPress; what is left is a server setting. How to confirm it. Your guide path returns a plain Apache 404 — a small unstyled “Not Found” page — while yoursite.com/index.php/local-guides/ reaches WordPress. That combination means PHP and the plugin are both healthy and only the rewrite is failing. On Apache, ask your host (or run, if you have shell access):
The fix is AllowOverride All on the directory that holds your site, then a reload:
Check the HTTPS site specifically. AllowOverride is set per virtual host, and a common setup has it correct on the plain-HTTP site while the HTTPS one — added later by an SSL certificate tool — never received it. Because HTTP redirects straight to HTTPS, every real visit uses the site that does not allow overrides, and the plugin’s rule is ignored even though AllowOverride All appears in your config. Make sure it applies to the :443 virtual host, not only :80.
On NGINX or IIS the .htaccess file does nothing at all, so the plugin does not write one; your host needs to route the guide path to WordPress. If your host will not change any of this, Reverse proxy and Embed API do not depend on .htaccess.

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What your visitors get if Obvlo is unavailable

The plugin serves a cached copy rather than an error, and never lets a slow response affect the rest of your site. Two of those numbers are deliberate. The request to Obvlo is abandoned after 4 seconds, so one slow page cannot occupy a PHP worker long enough to starve the rest of your site. After 3 consecutive failures Obvlo is not called again for a minute, so a sustained outage costs microseconds per request rather than four seconds.

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Diagnosing a page

Every response carries two headers:
  • X-Obvlo-Cache is one of hit, miss, stale, breaker-open, error or disabled.
  • X-Obvlo-Ref is a short id for the page. Quote it to Obvlo support.

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Changing the mount path

The path is baked into the archive when you download it. If you change the URL on your domain in the portal, download the plugin again and upload the new version — the old archive still carries the old path. Alternatively, correct it on the settings screen. Those edits are stored as overrides in WordPress options and survive a re-upload, so a locally corrected path is not clobbered by a fresh download.

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Updates

Obvlo distributes this plugin, not wordpress.org, so WordPress will never offer you an update for it. The plugin checks Obvlo once a day and shows an admin notice when a newer version exists, or a warning when your copy is too old for the current Obvlo service. Downloading a fresh archive from the portal is the update. Your settings survive it.

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Compatibility

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Removing it

Deactivating changes nothing else on your site — it simply stops serving the guides, and the path returns to WordPress. Deleting the plugin also removes its settings and its cached pages.

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Not on WordPress?

The same archive is available as a generic PHP proxy for a single-server PHP stack, and every other platform is covered by a configuration file you paste in. See Reverse proxy.