Configuration-options for Dynamic404
Within the Dynamic404 component, the toolbar lists a button Preferences which contains the following configuration-options.
| Enable redirecting | When this setting is disabled, Dynamic404 will search the Joomla! database for possible matches, when an error occurs. These matches will be listed on the error-page. When this setting is enabled, the first of these matches will be used to redirect the visitor to. |
| Enable logging | When this option is enabled, all 404-errors will be logged. If a 404-error is already logged, its counter will be increased. When a 404-error occurs but a redirect (either manual or automatic) occurs as well, that 404-error will not be logged. |
| Custom error-page | This dropdown allows you to select the error-page to be used by Dynamic404: When Dynamic404 error-page is choosen, a specific Dynamic404 error-page will be used, while the Default error-page refers to the error.php in your current template. Note that the functionality of both might be the same, when the error.php of your template contains Dynamic404 code. As a completely different alternative, using "Menu-Item" allows you to use a specific Joomla! page to display the error-information. |
| Menu-Item as xxx-page | When an error occurs, a HTTP Status code will be used to describe that error. The most known error is 404 Not Found, but other codes include 400 Bad Request, 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden and 500 Internal Server Error. When a specific error occurs, you can select a specific Menu-Item here to display the right error-page. The benefit here is that you can configure your error-page using a simple Joomla! article, and still have the capability of adding Joomla! modules to that page. |
| Search Menu-Items | When Dynamic404 is looking for possible matches, it can be configured to search specific parts of the Joomla! database. In this case, Dynamic404 will try to match the current URL (which does not work and displays an error) with the alias field of Menu-Items. |
| Search articles | The same as the option Search Menu-Items, but Dynamic404 matches the URL against the alias of Joomla! articles instead. |
| Search IDs | Instead of matching only the alias of either articles or Menu-Items, this option also allows the search for numeric values in the URL to match against the MySQL IDs. |
| Number of suggestions | This option determines how many matches (or suggestions) will be returned. |
| Prevent redirect-loops | This might be helpful when you have many custom redirect-rules. Imagine that an error-occurs on page A, and that you have setup a redirect-rule to redirect that URL to page B. Now, after a while you might make some error, and because of that page B also generates an error. Somehow page B redirects back to page A, which redirects to page B, which redirects to A. Your browser will object, mentioning a redirect-loop. When this option is enabled, Dynamic404 will try to prefetch the page that your visitor will be redirected to. If Dynamic404 fails to retrieve that page within 5 seconds, the visitor will not be redirected. |
| Default HTTP-status | When creating new redirect-rules in the Dynamic404 backend, a HTTP Status is configured to accompany that actual redirect when it happens. This option allows you to set the default-value when editing the redirect-rule. Most likely 301 is the best value here. |
| Caching | Caching in Dynamic404 is only used when serving the Joomla! error-page through a Menu-Item. The actual Joomla! page behind that Menu-Item will be fetched by Dynamic404 and cached. If you have a lot of 404-errors, caching is most likely a good thing. |
Ratings for matches
Within the parameters, you can also configure various ratings - numbers that determine how heavy a certain rule should weigh. When trying to find the best match for a 404-error, Dynamic404 tries to apply some kind of logic, which adds and retracts points from a certain base-number. The found match with the highest rating is listed above in the list of matches, or is used to redirect to.
The base rating that can be configured in the backend, determines the base value for found matches. Because Menu-Items are more likely to be a better match than Joomla! articles, they are given a better base-rating. However, when the alias of a Menu-Item differs more from the current URL than a certain article, then it might well be that a certain article match gets a higher rating, and is therefor listed above other Menu-Items.
This is all very vague and hard to describe. We hope to develop a well-described rating system in the future, that will explains better.
Created on Wednesday, 19 October 2011Modified on Wednesday, 19 October 2011
More tutorials in this section
- Example redirect with Dynamic404
- Dynamic404 redirection rules
- Patching error.php with Dynamic404
- Using Dynamic404 with VirtueMart
- Installing and configuring Dynamic404
- Configuration-options for Dynamic404