Thank you and I looked at that link and it is completely confusing to me. I am not a programmer. I do not understand HTML. I follow click-by-click tutorials and if even 1-click-direction is missing I screw it up. I need HELP. Not a research project with one article pointing to another and I have no idea what is relevant.
Please someone, SHOW ME WHAT TO DO.
Thank you tho, I just need someone who can explain things on a simple click-by-click level to a newbie who is in deep.
ps esmi much gratitude for taking the time to post the link. my apologies for expressing frustration it’s not at you, it’s my own technical ineptitude at the moment… please forgive me.
I have a 404 Error page on my site. It doesn’t ever show up because a bad url gets redirected to my home page. How do I make it so the 404 error actually shows when someone types a bad URL?
if you are using permalinks then the .htaccess file by default will do a search of your site for content matching, if not available it does go to the home page.
your .htaccess file shold have as follows.
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
The line
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Defines that ant request that is not a good page is directed to index.php which then wordpress generates the proper page. WordPress will generate a page not found only of your 404.php in the theme does to contain “The Loop”. However will send the page as a 200 request and not a proper 404 to the logs.
@evankopelson: Sounds like the problem is in your theme. Is that 404 page actually 404.php in your theme?
And I do appreciate that it can be frustrating for non-technical people when it comes to fixing issues or amending their theme. But the bottom line is that wrangling WordPress can involve some level of technical skill and there’s very little that can be done to reduce that. Posting click-by-click tutorials is simply too much for many technical users – although there are some excellent resources on wordpresss.tv and http://educhalk.org/blog/. But even these may not have exactly the tutorial that you’re looking for as it takes a long time to build up a comprehensive library.
In the meantime, it’s either bite the bullet and try to get to grips with the technical documents or hire someone to sort the problems out for you. Sorry…
