ExpressionEngine plugin - Friendly 404 pages

I've written a simple plugin for ExpressionEngine that suggests valid pages to users based on the final segement of a 404 page.

• November 1, 2008
• Updated September 19, 2024

Where am I? ¶

ExpressionEngine can serve 404 pages but once the user reaches the 404 page there isn’t much to help them recover from the error. You could of place a simple search form in the template but wouldn’t it be quicker if we could do it for the user?

How it works ¶

The plugin works by looking at the final segment of the 404 URI. For example http://www.yourdomain.com/about-us/products might be an invalid address which serves a 404 page. By using the plugin on your 404 templates ExpressionEngine will look for pages matching “products”. If a match is found it will be suggested to the user. A simple usability improvement.

Plugin and documentation ¶

The plugin is available on Google Code (ss-friendly-404 in Featured Downoads) and documentation is available there. There is also a thread on the EE Forums.

Tags

• ExpressionEngine
• PHP

Can you help make this article better? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

See Also

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• Running ExpressionEngine on Media Temple's (dv) Part 3
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  In the final part of the series we look at how to optimise the front end code on your site and cut response times by up to 50%.

• Running ExpressionEngine on Media Temple's (dv) Part 2
  Nov 27, 2007
  The second article in the series looking at optimising Apache and MySQL to run ExpressionEngine at optimum speed