But the end result is almost the same. Also, I use MTShortTitle to do the same thing you do with the keywords. What’s nice is that it allows you to keep your keyword functionality. Read more here. It might serve you a bit better. I’ve migrated my entries, changed the url scheme and will have my site up on the new server soon.

(You’ll be happy to note that the comment lag is gone!)

I’m going to look into your smart 404 and see if maybe I can use it in conjunction with what I’ve got already. Might work well, so thanks for that.

simply enable multiviews (either in httpd.conf or .htaccess)

Options +MultiViews

careful though, this can potentially have interesting side effects (read: rewrite rule loops) if combined with other existing heavy rewrite rules (particularly the ones you describe above, where it matches some name to the same name + extension)

Sorry. I would have posted it yesterday but Ashley’s tattoo scar hadn’t quite healed yet.

One thing that might help you with your redirect issue is to create an entirely new archive folder for your new entries. My old folder was “archives” and my new folder is “archive”, so I can throw an .htaccess file in the old folder to handle the redirects without it affecting the new folder.

Now, about your custom smart 404. I’m thinking it might be a good idea to combine what you’ve got with something a bit more traditional. I mean there could be many cases when someone hits the 404 with something that doesn’t return any search results. Might it be a good idea, in addition to the custom heading also add some custom 404 text and recent entries or something?

So your 404 might read like:

Looking for something?

(search results if any)

Nothing in there?

Here are my last 5 entries (via mt).

If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, blah, blah, yackety schmakity…

The other good way I’ve found to get the extensions off of your files in MT is to hack the “util.pm” file so that if your preferred extension field in the MT configuration screen is blank, no extension is written (currently, it defaults to .html if left blank). This is a pretty easy solution. I went with the RegEx one instead because I have a common MT template module (the header) which appears on every page so adding the RegEx line was just a change to one file.

As for your search results suggestion… yes… definitely. More text is necessary. I’m also going to throw a prepopulated search field in there at the top so you can adjust your search.

Well, I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with. The prepopulated search is a great idea…

Also, a stupid, but related, PHP question (I’m still pretty new to PHP) — in your search.php template, how are you using that smart404=1 paramater to display the 404 title?

I’m gonna see if we can’t edit the defaults in MT so that a blank file extension actually means no extension and then HTML is prefilled by default. That makes more sense anyway.

Yeah, the web is getting a lot more like print now in that most “new ideas” have already been thought of independently by other people. That’s one of the things that really bores me about the print design and advertising worlds. Thanks for looking into the default file extension improvement for MT… I agree, seems logical.

Keith,

The code which goes in the search page to catch the “smart404=1″ is:

<h2>
<?
if ($_GET['smart404'] == ’1′) {
echo “Were You Looking for Something?”;
} else {
echo “Search Results”;
}
?>
</h2>

That’s it…

This is a very helpful post (like most of the things I read in your blog) but I think you might want to reconsider how you’re handling the 404 errors.

IMHO I don’t think you should be automatically redirecting people or even replacing the location in the address bar.

You should be informing people that they’ve made a mistake or that the page has moved but you should still give them the chance to correct that mistake themselves.

I.e. if someone mistypes a URL, they should be able to correct their mistake in the address bar without having to re-type the whole thing. This isn’t possible with your current setup.

I’m afraid I can’t offer any pointers to any PHP code that would help you do this though, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

1. Jonathan: Thanks. Feeds are now fixed. Sorry to everyone who thinks I now have 15 new articles :)

2. I’m thinking about making Ashley Judd a permanent fixture on the smart404-induced search results page.

3. Goldfinch: Being able to retype a URL would be nice and I think I have a way to accomplish your suggestion without losing automatic rerouting. Later today, I should have an enhancement posted whereby I write out a slim horizontal div at the very top of the page containing the previously typed URL and a “Go” button. This will appear completely outside the design, as a Google toolbar would.

Good article nonetheless Mike…

You can accomplish the don’t-change-the-url-for-multiple by just outputting $full_code to the page instead of redirecting to it. The added advantage is that you won’t be performing the search twice!

I would suggest automatic redirection to single-page matches though and consider adding a you got here the “wrong way” bit. Often times, a visitor arrives at a page through a link that they have no control over and you want search engines to update their links anyhow.