Using Joomla

Error Pages

In a perfect world, there would be no need for error pages. Error pages, often called 404 pages, are designed to notify the visitor that what she is looking for isn’t there.

Figure 19-4. Joomla’s default 404 page

Figure 19-4 shows an example of Joomla’s default 404 page. As you can see, it is functional but not very pretty. We encourage site administrators to get creative with their 404 pages. This helps users find what they are looking for and doesn’t look as bad when they hit a bad URL.

Some common things to do with a 404 page are:

• Display a “page not found” type of message

• Redirect the user to the website’s home page along with an error message

• Redirect the user to the website’s search page along with an error message

• Entertain the user with something to make them laugh.

For more ideas, check out these two articles at Smashing Magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/25/wanted-your-404-error-pages/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/17/404-error-pages-reloaded/

Now we’ll show you how to customize your own error page in Joomla.

The error page in Joomla is located in system/error.php. This file is what Joomla shows when it needs to display an error like 404. We don’t recommend you make changes to this file directly. Instead, make a copy of the error.php file and put it inside your template directory. Joomla will look there first for an error file ...