Joomla! Documentation™

This page has been archived. This page contains information for an unsupported Joomla! version or is no longer relevant. It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.

This tutorial will show you how to create a custom 404 Error Page for use in your Joomla 1.5 Web Site.

This page summarizes popular techniques for adding Joomla! 404 Error Pages, as discussed by Amy Stephens and others in the Joomla! Forum Post Custom 404 Inside the Content Area

Four Steps to Creating a Custom 404 Error Page

1. Create an Uncategorized '404' Article

Create an 'uncategorized' article in Joomla! to serve as your 404 Page. Include some text such as Sorry, we could not find the page you were looking for... and if necessary, also any useful navigational links. For example, you may wish to add a link back to your site's home page.

2. Create and copy a link to that new 404 Article.

Create a menu item which links to the new 404 Article and 'apply' your changes. Then copy the URL information (index.php?optio...), set the menu item as 'unpublished' and close out of the menu editing page. You may want to paste the copied URL into Notepad or somewhere accessible for the time-being.

3. Copy error.php to your Template's Directory

In your Joomla! installation copy the file error.php from the templates/system directory, to your Template directory. For example, if I was using a template named 'Cleancloud' I would copy the error.php file to the templates/cleancloud directory.

4. Modify error.php to Redirect 404 Errors to your 404 Article

Edit the error.php file as follows, adding the code below immediately under the 'restricted access' line:

 if (($this->error->code) == '404') {
header('Location: index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75');
exit;
} 

Replace the location information (index.php?option..) with the URL from the menu item you created.

Additional Steps toward a Better Custom 404 Error Page

• Add the following line to the robots.txt file located in the root directory of your Joomla! installation.

Disallow: /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75

Replacing the (index.php?option..) location with your 404 Article URL.

• Follow the Best-Practices described here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/perfect404/

• Be creative, add a 404 Haiku or maybe an Interesting Photo

More Custom Error Page Information:

• Joomla! Documentation: Custom Error Pages
• Joomla! Documentation: System Error Pages
• HTTP/1.1 Status Code Definitions
• Google Webmaster - Analyzing Crawl Errors