Question

Joomla 1.5.2 Home page only error 404 - Component not found, SEO does not change it

Asked by: randomOne

I'm having a problem that I have seen many posts but no solutions.  I have a site that is 98% complete, so many hours in and yet, the home page doesn't load.  I get a 404 - Component not found error when trying to view the site.  I can open any page using the url of the page (problem is there whether or not sef is on) but not when I view the front page.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.   Here are my details:

Linux, PHP Version 4.3.9, Apache, Joomla! 1.5.2
http://heartofwellness.org                       (doesn't work)
http://heartofwellness.org/home.html     (works fine)

I have checked and doublechecked the config file, permissions are right, I moved the error.php file into the dirctory of the template as suggested elsewhere to no avail.

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Asked On
2008-07-07 at 23:08:09ID23545605
Tags

Joomla 1.5.2 front page only 404

Topics

Content Management

,

MySQL Server

,

WebApplications

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: fearialtogPosted on 2008-07-09 at 02:30:24ID: 21961734

Your problem is that the url-
http://heartofwellness.org
is actually shorthand.
When a URL like this is entered on the browser's address bar, the browser looks in the main folder of a website for a file called index.html or index.php
The browser therefore enters the full address for you http://heartofwellness.org/index.html but it usually will only display the shorthand version.

You have changed index file to home.html
That is why the browser cannot find it without the full path.

Change it back or upload a file called index.html with a redirect to home.html This is by far the best option especially for SEO.

Here is the code for your new index file. FTP it to your main root folder of your site - usually called public_html or htdocs and so on.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Heart of Wellness</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;URL= http://heartofwellness.org/home.html" />

</head>

<body>
If for some reason you are not redirected click here
</body>
</html>

 

by: randomOnePosted on 2008-07-09 at 06:41:31ID: 21963420

This doesn't actually change the situation.  If i now enter the full url of heartofwellness.org/index.html then the redirect comes into effect.  It is bulky, and would mess with positioning as there would be no content on the index.html page.  The main problem is that because it is a joomla site, the index.php file is what loads.  The problem that I am having is within Joomla!.  I have successfully used a home.html file on the front page within joomla! before.  I don't know why I can't now.  Any other suggestions would really be apprecated.

Jamil

 

by: fearialtogPosted on 2008-07-09 at 14:36:03ID: 21968630

You are sucessfully using home.html with Joomla which is working on your site exactly as you set it. Your problem is with internet browser protocol. It is the browser (IE, FIrefox, Opera, etc.) that is looking for the index file. Even search engines will look for an index file and then follows the links on this page to index your site. Without the index file, the chances are that your search engine profile will be poor.

In any website it is a essential that you use an index file. You may have noticed that every folder that came with Joomla has a mainly blank file, named index.html within it.

It exists for security reasons to prevent potential hackers from gaining useful information about your website.

Your best option is to make sure that you have a working index.php file in the root folder of your site. This is a basic principal operation of Joomla. Without it you could be exposed to many risks.

If you still want to use home.html, another option is to set a redirect on your webserver using the software provided by your hosting company. The most popular is Cpanel >>in the  domains section click on Redirects. Then enter the url that you want to redirect to.

If the redirect cannot cause layout problems but search engines do not like redirects.

Hope this helps.

 

by: fearialtogPosted on 2008-07-12 at 01:52:46ID: 21988310

Objection to question withdrawal without awarding points.

The answers that I have posted here are expert and a valid solution to the asker's problem. It appears that the asker has decided not to heed advice which conforms to web development best practice. Indeed I proposed other solutions out of line with best practice, so that the asker could pursue alternative strategies.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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