Thread

I’ve been browsing through the forums and other sections but couldn’t find an answer to my question. I’ve already set up a 404 page in case a post isn’t found but I was wondering if there was a way to display a 404 error page in case the template url isn’t correct such as:
mysite.com/site/sometemplate/somethingelse so that it displays a 404 page when sometemplate or somethinelse doesn’t exist. I did read somewhere that this isn’t possible with EE but I’m curious if someone found a way around it. 😊

Hmm. That should work. What do you see when you try it?

It doesn’t..
I have a template named content and a page to show posts named article.
It will only work if I add a number after article like this:
somesite.com/content/article/1/ but when I have a misspelled post it will just show the last post in that category. It also doesn’t show a 404 for templates (not template group) that don’t exist.

Hi Nora!

404 pages are only triggered automatically when the template group doesn’t exist.

Because of the dynamic nature of EE URLs, there’s no built-in logic for displaying a 404 when a particular entry doesn’t exist. Instead, you need to use {redirect="404"} in your templates when you’ve determined that you have no matching entries to show.

For more information, please see this blog entry.

Thanks for the reply. I’ve already done that and it works fine but I’m trying to find a way to show a 404 page when the template within the template group doesn’t exist. Hope that makes it a little clearer. 😊

Yikes, you did say that. Sorry.

Could you use that logic in your template group’s index template? If you’re not expecting to pass in specific parameters to that template, you could test whether you have too many URL segments, meaning that ExpressionEngine couldn’t find the requested template and defaulted to index instead.

This is just a guess, because I don’t have a copy of EE handy.

Sorry not sure what you mean.
When a template doesn’t exist it does redirect to the index of the template group but that would give search engines the idea that the page exists and is a duplicate of the index. I’ve already had a lot of trouble with search engine rankings since I switched over to EE and at Google I was told that the wrong system results could be causing it.

I haven’t played around with the Query features yet but would checking the database to see if a template within a template exists help solve this?

This appears to be working when segment_2 doesn’t exist:

{if segment_2 != ''}

{exp:query sql="SELECT template_id FROM exp_templates WHERE template_name = '{segment_2}' & group_id = '3' "}

{if no_results}
This template doesn't exist
{/if}

{/exp:query}{/if}

I’m still checking if everything’s correct before I redirect it to my 404 page but so far it’s giving the right results. 😊

Have you looked at the blog entry that Jesse B linked to? I think you need to make use of the ‘require_entry’ tag and do something like:

{exp:weblog:entries require_entry="yes" rdf="off" limit="1" disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"}
{if no_results}
{if segment_2}
{redirect="404"}
{/if}
{/if}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

at the top of your index page, which is somewhat hackish because of the extraneous queries involved. I’m using something similar.

This can also probably be done with .htaccess, more efficiently, but the host I’m on doesn’t let me touch .htaccess, so I have to do wierd hackish stuff in my index template 🐛

Thanks 😊
I read the blog but I believe that’s to check if there are entries.. would that work with checking templates too?

The no_entries condition would trigger if there are no entries. If there is a segment_2, it would fire the redirect, so the template would only display if there were no segment_2. If you want to allow certain values of segment_2, you could use an advanced conditional to control when the redirect fires.

Again, I do something similar because I have no access to .htaccess.

But I’m pretty sure the best way to do this would be via .htaccess, if you can do that.

Thank you so much 😊
I’ll go try it out now.