Making WordPress.org

Opened 11 years ago

Closed 3 months ago

#150 closed defect (bug) (fixed)

Better 404 page for WordPress.org

Reported by: bradparbs's profile bradparbs Owned by:
Milestone: Priority: low
Component: General Keywords: close
Cc:

Description (last modified by ocean90)

Migrated from #wp23160:

Right now, if you get a 404 on wp.org, there isn't really much.

example: http://wordpress.org/howabouta404

I'd suggest at the minimum changing the wording away from 'no posts' to 'no pages', and potentially adding links to commonly accessed areas, such as 'Were you looking for a plugin, theme, blah blah?'

In the side bar, there is also a 'Categories' section, that always displays 'No categories', maybe remove that as well?


Current 404 pages:

Attachments (1)

2018-07-02 at 17.37.png (44.3 KB) - added by karmatosed 6 years ago.
404page current

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (26)

#1 @melchoyce
10 years ago

  • Cc melchoyce added

#2 @Hanni
10 years ago

  • Cc h@… added

Worth nothing that there's something at /404/ which could possibly be utilised or simply vanquished if it is not to be used in fixing this?

https://i.cloudup.com/LkmGdWFw2W.tiff

#3 @Otto42
10 years ago

We can make a 404 page look any way we like. Any ideas?

#4 @Hanni
10 years ago

@melchoyce the wizard is already watching and will have some design ideas, perhaps? I'd love to help with text, if that's needed. Will mull it over.

#5 follow-up: @Hanni
10 years ago

So, I included the content at /404/ above because it already includes some of what @bradparbs was suggesting...

Questions: can it be contextual, or perhaps can we make use of the most common things people seem to be looking for when they hit 404s, and list them as such?

Otherwise information on top of what is given the nav is clearly necessary as just effectively reproducing that'd doesn't really give the user much help.

#6 @Otto42
10 years ago

Yes, our global 404 handler is definitely no longer working correctly. I suspect this happened during the nginx migration. What you see at the /404/ url was supposed to be global for all 404 cases, and it used to work, once.

Right now, it's showing the default 404 for whatever theme is being used instead, depending on what site you hit.

#7 in reply to: ↑ 5 @Otto42
10 years ago

Replying to Hanni:

Questions: can it be contextual, or perhaps can we make use of the most common things people seem to be looking for when they hit 404s, and list them as such?

Given that the current 404 is generated by the various themes in use on w.org and make, we can put more or less whatever we like in there, based on whatever information is available.

So, basically, yes. If we're not going to reinstate the original global 404 (which wasn't terribly helpful to begin with), then we can have it individualized to specific sites and such without too much trouble.

Ideally, if it makes sense for this to be different for different sites, then I'd probably do something like make a Page-name that each make site can edit to customize their own particular 404 page, with some kind of fallback position if they don't have one. That way we don't have to micromanage the thing via SVN for each site.

This ticket was mentioned in IRC in #wordpress-meta by sams. View the logs.


10 years ago

#9 @samuelsidler
10 years ago

  • Owner set to georgestephanis
  • Status changed from new to assigned

George is going to work up something here.

(Some sites are worse than others.)

#10 @melchoyce
9 years ago

Did @georgestephanis ever get a chance to work on this?

#12 @samuelsidler
8 years ago

  • Owner georgestephanis deleted

#13 @here
8 years ago

  • Cc mike@… added

Please consider returning an http 404 response rather than the current 200. This may warrant a separate ticket.

In looking into " soft 404 " issues on another site, I looked to wordpress.org as an example. However, the current 404 page returns a 200 OK along with it's "404" content.

curl -I https://wordpress.org/404/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta by ocean90. View the logs.


8 years ago

#15 @ocean90
8 years ago

  • Description modified (diff)

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #design by sam. View the logs.


8 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta by ocean90. View the logs.


8 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #design by karmatosed. View the logs.


6 years ago

@karmatosed
6 years ago

404page current

#19 @karmatosed
6 years ago

The above is what is showing now for the page. It seems some work has been done. Anything else people would like to see on this?

#20 in reply to: ↑ description @boemedia
6 years ago

I think we could make more use of the 404-page and give users some guidance/suggestions where they can go.
Maybe we can get some inspiration from here: https://uxplanet.org/10-great-examples-of-404-error-pages-6dff84eea87d
Replying to bradparbs:

I'd suggest potentially adding links to commonly accessed areas, such as 'Were you looking for a plugin, theme, blah blah?'

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #design by karmatosed. View the logs.


4 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #design by estelaris. View the logs.


4 years ago

#23 @ibdz
4 years ago

  • Keywords has-screenshots needs-refresh added; needs-ui removed

In today's Design triage, we agreed to stick with the current 404 page.

#24 @ben.greeley
13 months ago

  • Keywords close added; has-screenshots needs-refresh removed

Since this ticket is quite old and the 404 page has made a few iterations since the original request, I'd like to suggest we close this.

The newest version of the 404 page that is being rolled out with the redesign project seems to contain a number of the suggestions made in this thread.

The new 404 page can be found at https://wordpress.org/showcase/dkdkd

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/rITsks

Last edited 13 months ago by ben.greeley (previous) (diff)

#25 @coffee2code
3 months ago

  • Resolution set to fixed
  • Status changed from assigned to closed
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