TYPO3 4.0.1 404
By Dmitry Dulepov and ben van 't ende
Finally TYPO3 has solid error handling since version 4.0.1. Credits go out to Dmitry Dulepov for building that and to Martin Kutscher for supporting that. Although the news item on TYPO3.org only mentions this like “Corrected some HTTP status codes” this really is a huge improvement. Should you be bothered? No not really. I will show you how to make optimal use of this and provide your visitors with useful information and for the techies Dmitry will show you how it is done.
This tutorial is intended for TYPO3 admins and editors who want to provide the vistors of their sites with a meaningful error page.
The good old days
Every once in a while, we long for times that were, but not so in TYPO3 development. I assume here that we use RealURL for generating those nice URLs. RealURL is one of those improvements we cannot live without as it shows us where we are in a website in a logical fashion (if configured correctly). Lets hit a non existing page in TYPO3 3.8. We get presented with the following error message in the good old fashioned style.
OK, so now what? It's nice to know the page does not exist. If correctly configured in the install tool, the server throws a correct header (HTTP/1.x 404 Not Found) letting the client (your browser or Google) know that this page is not here. I presume Google is intelligent enough to use this info and not list this URL in their search results.
