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It hopefullly doesn’t happen very often but sometimes a user might enter an address which doesn’t exist. In most situations a simple page is displayed, telling him that the page doesn’t exist. Having some more detailled information can be very helpful, especially when you just relaunched your website. Google & Co need a while to reindex your page and users will probably see “page not found” more frequently than usually.

Concrete5 allows you to customize this page but it needs a few modifications. Some of them are probably a bit hard to find – which is why I wrote this tutorial. The standard Concrete5 “page not found” page looks like this:

As you can see, the layout uses the default concrete5 dashboard theme. First, we’d like to use our own theme! Open “config/site_theme_paths.php”, there are already a few commented examples in the file:

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<?php  
 
defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_("Access Denied."));
 
$v = View::getInstance();
$v->setThemeByPath('/page_not_found', "yourtheme");
 
/* 
	you can override system layouts here  - but we're not going to by default 
 
	For example: if you would like to theme your login page with the Green Salad theme,
	you would uncomment the lines below and change the second argument of setThemeByPath 
	to be the handle of the the Green Salad theme "greensalad" 
 
$v = View::getInstance();
 
$v->setThemeByPath('/login', "yourtheme");
 // $v->setThemeByPath('/403', "yourtheme");
 // $v->setThemeByPath('/register', "yourtheme");
 // $v->setThemeByPath('/dashboard', "yourtheme");
 
*/

In line 5 and 6 you can see the two lines I’ve added. Make sure that you replace “yourtheme” with the name of your theme – identical to the directory name of your theme in the folder “themes”.

Make sure your theme has a file called view.php. It might look similar to this:

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<?php
defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_("Access Denied."));
$this->inc('elements/header.php');
?>
 
 	<div id="content">
	   <div id="body">
	   	<!-- begin -->
	   	<?php
	   	echo $innerContent;
	   	?>
	   	<!-- end -->
	   </div>
	</div>	
 
<?php
$this->inc('elements/footer.php');
?>

$innerContent is where all the information is saved.

Once you’ve saved site_theme_paths.php your error page uses your own theme. In my case like this:

Sitemap

It might make sense to display a sitemap when a users landed on the 404 page. This is also easy to do. Create a copy of /concrete/single_pages/page_not_found.php here /single_pages/page_not_found.php. This makes sure we don’t modify files within the Concrete5 core. Open the file and make it look like this:

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<?php  defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_("Access Denied.")); ?>
 
<h1 class="error"><?php echo t('Page Not Found')?></h1>
 
<?php echo t('No page could be found at this address.')?>
 
<?php  if (is_object($c)) { ?>
	<br/><br/>
	<?php  $a = new Area("Main"); $a->display($c); ?>
<?php  } ?>
 
<br/><br/>
 
<?php
$bt = BlockType::getByHandle('autonav');
$bt->controller->orderBy = 'display_asc';                    
$bt->controller->displayPages = 'top';
$bt->controller->displaySubPages = 'all';     
$bt->controller->displaySubPageLevels = 'all';                    
$bt->render('view');
?>		
 
<br/><br/>
 
<a href="<?php echo DIR_REL?>/"><?php echo t('Back to Home')?></a>.

Lines 13 to 20 uses the autonav block to display a sitemap. That’s it! In my case the “page not found” page looks like this:

A bit useless in my case but probably more helpful if you have more pages than I do.