Creating a Custom 404 Error Page
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Bad Advice[edit]
Following this article's instructions causes all 404 errors to end up as 302 location redirects. This means that broken links aren't correctly reported and causes problems such as search engines continuing to index broken links.
Minor recommendation[edit]
As written, the code caused this error "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete..." when redirecting things like www.mysite.com/somefolder/non-existent_page.htm
Instead of
if (($this->error->code) == '404') { header('Location: index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75'); exit; }
I used this
if (($this->error->code) == '404') { header('Location: /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75'); exit; }
and that resolved the issue.
-Tom Warfield www.warfieldconsulting.com
What If[edit]
How should the redirection code be if we have a multi-language Joomla 1.7 installation? That is we will need as many 404 redirections as the number of installed languages.