Any non-existent URL containing certain numbers, displays the home page instead of a 404 error

Question

This is something that I noticed on one of my websites:

If I add certain digits after the home page URL, it does not give me a 404, as is expected. It displays the home page, with the browser page title taken from one of the other menu items. Here are some examples:

http://www.example.com/36-this-menu-item-does-not-exist In the above URL, if you change the 36 to a 32 or 37 it does the same http://www.example.com/12-this-shows-a-404-error

Has anyone seen anything like this?

I am wondering if it has to do with SEF Urls or perhaps something else.

I checked my .htaccess to make sure there are no redirects with these numbers in the URL.

Any tips will be appreciated.

Answer 1

It's just the way the router works. The number is the ID of the article. Joomla needs to know how to convert the URL to a page, and so one way is to look what number is in the URL and see if that matches an article.

Everything beyond the number is for SEO / human readable links, but Joomla doesn't need to know that, so it can be anything.

Your 404 pages presumably do not have articles with a matching ID.

If you want to see how this works, it is under components/com_content/router.php. It's quite well commented as to the process, the bit which seems to apply in this case being as follows:

/*
         * If there is only one segment, then it points to either an article or a category.
         * We test it first to see if it is a category.  If the id and alias match a category,
         * then we assume it is a category.  If they don't we assume it is an article
         */

Answer 2

Yes, I have seen this happening before and it was caused by the Blank Component.

So, I guess you are likely using this component for having a modules only home page.

Unfortunately there was no fix for this, the last time I checked and I quickly revert back to the core way - by having for example a featured articles home page, with no article items at all, or a single article page loading modules.