Not correcting redirect to 404 page if url not exist

Question

Today I caught a bug with my 404 page redirecting.

If I have not existing page like this https://domain.com/blablapage, redirecting to 404 is working all good.

But if user go to url https://domain.com/blablapage/onemorepage, Joomla not redirecting him to 404, but open main page with any of menu item.

My custom error.php starting with:

if (($this->error->getCode()) == '404') {
    header('Location: ' . JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53')); // Url to 404 page
    exit;
}

Answer 1

This is a well known issue and can be considered as expected behavior for the time being. Basically, the URL path segment is cast to an integer somewhere in the component's router. So 23fr23f2g becomes 23 and a content item with ID 23 is loaded. Some patches to fix the issue have been proposed but haven't made it to core yet. There might some SEF extensions available that solve the issue.

Answer 2

Are you sure that the corresponding MenuItem exists?

The above header() function needs the url taken from the MenuItem itself.

So you need one article and one menu item (hidden).

To test if it works, just go to your Menu, go in to the menuitem like 'about/whateverYouLike', then copy the full path from the URL field (detail view tab) and paste to your JRoute().

The url has form of "index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3" and must exist in MenuItem tree.