#2748 – 404 Error page opens up the home page

Hi

It doesn't "open the home page". It uses the default Itemid, because none has been set, and Joomla displays the module, template, etc attached to the home page.
If you have a different layout for non-home pages on your site, then you can select which Itemid to use to display the home page in sh404SEF configuration. Please refer to the Error page documentation on this page, specifically "Itemid to use".

Rgds

Hi

The first thing is that you had selected "Use Joomla 404 error page", so the sh404SEF was disabled. I restored the setting to its default, "Override Joomla 404 page".

As is often the case, the problem is coming from your template. Switching back to one of Joomla default template fixes the problem immediately:

[xxxx]

I also tried to look at your template settings, but I can't really, as the template settings page is broken (you can't "Save" or "Cancel" from the page, at least I can't on Chrome). In addition, there does not seem to be any settings related to this, so it has to be internal.

While looking at this, I noticed a few malfunctions in sh404SEF:

- it keeps trying to display analytics reports (and thus show an error because you have not setup analytics), while I specifically set it to not display any report
- You still had the "sh404SEF custom conten" category, and the "__404__" article that we used a very long time ago to display error page. This has been changed a long time ago, and should have been removed during updates to a more recent version. I suspect the removal failed because you have set a menu item leading to that 404 page (which is not needed) but I'm not sure. I deleted that category and article, but again, that's not use anymore, so it doesn't have any effect.
- There are many aliases similar to this:
which are invalid and may be causing issues. Do you know where they come from? There cannot be any / there, it has to be a non-sef URL. Those should be deleted.

Though I know the problem is not in sh404SEF, but in the template, next step to understand the problem would be to download an akeeba backup, install on a local machine and debug the PHP. I can't do that because the backup is too large, at 2GB+. If you can exclude images, or whatever takes up that much space, from the backup and get down to a reasonable size, like 300 to 500 MB max, I can do that.

Rgds

Hi

I wasted 30 minutes on trying to restore the mysql stuff, it always dies in the middle, with an invalid characters error.

Please just use Akeeba backup, simply exclude the /images folder or which folders have a lot of data. That's by far the most reliable way of doing such transfers.

Rgds

Hi

You put a password on the installer...

Rgds

Hi

So I got the backup and installed it on my local machine.

The immediate result, without any kind of change, is that everything works perfectly fine:

- The error page is displayed exactly as it should:
[xxxx]

- even the issue with Google Analytics trying to load up even if disabled is gone:
[xxxx]

Everything is absolutely normal. The PHP version I am using for this test is pretty much the same, 4.4.45 vs 4.4.1, this is also Apache

There is not much I can on top of that. One thing that can happen here is that your dev site is completely damaged, and just restoring the site properly, files and db, simply came back to a working state. I have no better idea, but that seems likely. I would encourage you to do the same, and create another copy of your dev site. It might always be something on the server configuration, but I don't see what could cause that, so just a damaged database/file system seems like the most likely reason.

Rgds

Hi

I will leave this ticket open in case you need to add something. It will automatically close in 2 weeks, if not further comment is made.

Best regards

Hi

Glad to hear that, that's what I suspected when I saw that many diverse errors.

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open another one as needed.

Rgds