Build-Your-Own Starship Enterprise — Reflections on DrupalCon Portland 2024
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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.
To set up 404 page for your site, go to the install tool and find a setting named [pageNotFound_handling]. Type the URL where your 404 page is located. If the page is on the same domain, it should be the URL without the domain name (i.e. /404/). If it is on another server, it should be absolute.
Create a hidden page with the title 404 in the root of your website. Multiple domains in one install are supported. You can create a 404 page for every (sub)domain you have. Now provide your visitor with meaningful information. Maybe you have recently moved whole parts of your website. Maybe you have thrown away some pages by accident. Tell your visitor, let your visitor know what is going on. Provide a link to the search engine on your website and perhaps provide a sitemap.
Under the hood
When TYPO3 detects that a page does not exist, it executes special functions that determine how this situation should be handled. The most common situation is to fetch a dynamic page. Since the error page can be in another domain, TYPO3 puts a proper <base /> tag into the page ensuring that the page will display images and links properly.
One problem that arises from fetching error page is logging. If you use Webalizer, you can tell it to ignore this page in reports. However if your log analysis software does not allow excluding certain page you want want to exclude this page using conditional logging as described on the Apache web site (<link httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html _blank>http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html#conditional</link>)
For AWStats you can use this next line in your config file to exclude the 404 pages:
SkipFiles="/404/ REGEX[^\/typo3]"
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