ExpressionEngine 404 Pages

expression-engine--404-pages.md

Managing 404 pages in Expression Engine

A couple of notes for my own reference on 404 pages when building Expression Engine websites.

While you can nominate a template to use for a 404 page, it only really covers top-level urls that just use a single segment - doesn't deal with urls 2 segments and above as it assumes it may be a segment_1 url that handles all sub-urls itself.

To get around this, we can add this to the page templates (or a shared include):

{!-- if it's not the homepage, and it's not the 404 page, then look for an entry that matches the url_title of the last
  -- segment of the url, and if it doesnt exist then go to the 404 page instead
  --}
{if segment_1 != '' && last_segment != "404"}
    {exp:channel:entries disable="members|categories|pagination" url_title="{transcribe:last_segment}" dynamic="no"}
        {if no_results}{redirect="/404"}{/if}
    {/exp:channel:entries}
{/if}

(Note: if you have any pages that intentionally aren't generated from a CMS entry (eg a job description using an ATS plugin), then you'll need to add that as an exclusion in the if statement otherwise it'll go to the 404 page.)

Considerations with multi-lingual transcribe sites

You'll still need the above code in all the page templates, but you'll also want to create multi-lingual 404 pages that add a few complications.

You'll need to create a separate CMS page in each language for your 404 page content, call the pages uniquely with the language code, eg "/404-en", you could then within the 404 page template pull the page content out in {exp:channel:entries} or {exp:transcribe:entries} by using :

{exp:transcribe:entries
    parse="inward"
    channel="general"
    disable="members|categories|pagination"
    dynamic="no"
    transcribe="disable"
    url_title="404-{transcribe:language_abbreviation}"}

Note that this way, the 404 page urls will end up as /en/404, but they now won't give the actual http/404 error code, to do that you'll need to enable the expressionengine HTTP Headers addon (comes with expressionengine but disabled by default), and pop {exp:http_header status="404"} at the top of your 404 page template.