404 error redirects

[deansaddigh]

ok so i have a 404 error redirect which works well. my question is

 

if you got to here the page displays

 

http://www.languageschoolsuk.com/student_photos.htm

 

but say you miss spell it like this

 

http://www.languageschoolsuk.com/stuent_photos.htm

 

it takes me to a blank page.

 

why doesnt the 404 error come up.

 

Kind regards

 

Dean

 

 

[cags]

If typing in an invalid address shows a blank page, then what exactly is your '404 error redirect which works well' doing?

[deansaddigh]

erm well thats a good question.

 

if you go here

 

http://www.languageschoolsuk.com/school_details and forget the trailing slash it works

 

heres my htacess file

 

RewriteEngine on

#change mask php files
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [NC,L]

#seo friendly url
RewriteRule ^school_details/([a-zA-Z_|.-]+)/? school_details.php?id=$1 [L]

#prevent hotlinking
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?languageschoolsuk\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/4224/logovg.png [L]

#compress php files to save bandwidth
<ifModule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression 16386 
</ifModule>

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

[cags]

What do you get if you just use...

 

ErrorDocument 404 "Darn"

[deansaddigh]

the page goes blank, unless i do it on the link i showed you.

[cags]

Playing around with different addresses on your server (handy it being live, most peoples aren't) it would seem that your host has set-up your server so that ErrorDocument cannot be set for files with a .php extension. I'm not entirely sure how or why this is done. But that is almost certainly the case. Is it shared hosting? You might need to contact them and find out why.

[deansaddigh]

Ahhh i see, thanks alot man, atleast i nkow now ill have to go and speak to them.

 

Weird.

 

Thanks again

[deansaddigh]

Sorry to post  again, do you mean i cant specify a 404.php file in the htacess file?

or that it wont redirect pagfes that are php on the site?

[cags]

I mean that URI requests to the server which end in a .php file extension will not trigger the ErrorDocument page, i.e. requests to something like...

 

domain.com/blah.php

 

...won't trigger the error document, but ...

 

domain.com/blah.foo 

 

...will. Remember that although in your example you were requesting .htm, this is being rewritten to php.

 

As I said I'm not entirely sure how they have done this, they must have something in their .conf files along the lines of...

 

<files .*\.php>
# disabled here
</files>

 

How exactly it's disabled though I'm not sure. Looking at the docs I can see that ErrorDocument overrides FileInfo, but so does mod_rewrite so they can't have disabled that. So unless they can set a default value, which isn't overridden I don't know (may have a look later out of morbid curiosity).

[deansaddigh]

Oh yeah i see, how very annoying.

 

good news ive fixed it.

 

basically in the control panel, they have custom error pages, so i just set the 404 error to be 404.php and it seems to have fixed it, maybe they have an overide function that overides htaccess . and you have to use there custom error pages in the control panel

 

Thanks again man