Posted by: Qasim Virjee on Tuesday, 20 January 2009

The new joomla handles errors differently, and there's been quite a bit of discussion about why this is, as well as whether the current solution works as well as it should.  Mainly, this discussion stems from people being concerned about making their site uber-Search Engine Friendly.

Now, I have my own personal gripes with some people who spend too much time throwing the 'SEF' acronym around [ie. paying more attention to garnering machine-love than making their site relevant to readers], but out of the discussion comes an important mini-predicament; Joomla 1.5 uses an error.php file [stock URL: /administrator/templates/system/error.php] which resides outside of the CMS.

Error.php is the file which gets loaded when viewers cannot be presented the info they request (leading to 403 and 404 errors) - the default one is super ugly and sure to scare people away from your site at first glance; this is something to avoid and doing so is easy; you have to create a custom error.php and bung it into your front-end template's main directory.

I recommend reading the documentation on this approach and then looking @ the source code through your browser for a page on your site - then copying and pasting in whatever error message you want to replace the copy of that page you were looking at.  Here on Why Joomla?  you'll notice that I've thrown in the site's search form - so people can quickly keep looking for the info they wanted in the first place.

As we've just upgraded to 1.5 and done away with JoomSEF/OpenSEF; a quirky URL rewriter module, our out-of-box semantic URLs have changed throughout the site - so I'm sure some of you will come into contact with our homemade error.php soon :)

If you have other approaches to this problem, please comment!

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re: Regarding Joomsef posted by Sathiya on 2009-06-02 Sathiya wrote: Hi, I have installed Joomsef for my site and also installed joomla comment. when i enable the joomsef, i cannt add, delete, edit, quote, reply and search the comments. Quote: Without Joomsef it will be working fine. But enable the joomsef is not working. Quote: Please advice me for this issue. Thanks for advance, Vijay Quote

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