Here is how my journal handles 404 errors :
And this is how I want it to appear :
In short, I want the 404 error to be redirected to a dedicated custom page.
Alas, this seems impossible, unless I commit the sin to modify the core code.
As advised on this forum post : How to insert hyperlinking anchors throughout an OJS 3.1.2 site (system links inclusive)? - #11 by teog one can simply modify the /lib/pkp/classes/core/Dispatcher.php and replace the line “header(‘HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found’);” by, for example, “header(‘Location: /404’)” (with ‘/404’ as the url of a dedicated custom page) to get the result from my second screenshot.
Well doing that even though it seems very simple and convenient is simply out of question for the project I am working on.
I can’t find a way to do that via a plugin neither, the only solution I can think of is to fix it in a future PKP lib release. But I can’t find any prospect of such feature in the PKP Roadmap.
Really it baffles me, all other journal somehow manage their 404 error with some dedicated page with links to other pages of the website so that the visitor is not stuck in a dead end, so why aren’t we fixing this horrible handle404 function ?