Project Detail

Description

We need an ErrorDocument 404 php error handler for bad links including dropped pages on a web site or requests for a url that has never been on the site. Note that mod_rewrite is in heavy use on the site.

Specification:

Redirection to a simple php page, i.e. err404.php in the root directory of the site to be handled by simple .htaccess code. (ErrorDocument 404 /Err404.php).

We must return a 404 error to the requesting source AND display html code from within the Err404.php handling. Please note that we will replace test html code with a smarty include directive to our error page from within Err404.php.

A primary specification is that code 200 is NOT sent to a requestor because error redirection forwards a request to our error page, i.e. the url may be bad but a resulting page does exist due to error handling and therefore the request was satisfied without a 404 error.

Mod_rewrite is used extensively on this site from .htaccess, and to some extent from http.conf and the code has to handle redirection for rewritten urls that no longer exist.

Example of desired handling:

There is an existing .htaccess rule for http://mysite.com/index.php?id=xyz15 although it has been deleted.

htaccess snippet:

RewriteRule ^some-url.html(&xid=[0-9a-f]*)?$ index.php?id=xyz15&%1 [L]

A request for http://mysite.com/some-url.html can return 200 OR return 404 AND it must cause redirection to the error page called by Err404.php.

Another example:

http://mysite.com/bad-url.html - a url that never has existed on the site is requested.
Your code MUST result in both a 404 code return AND redirection from Err404.php to a valid page.