How to customize the content area of a 404 page

[shorthills]

Hi,
What’s the procedure to customize the 404 page? I was going to copy it to my child theme and do my thing, but I looked at 404.php and there were warnings not to touch it.

Thanks.

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello,

The better approach is to copy content-404.php to your Child theme. This will be a much more simple file to edit, where you’re just editing the content area of the 404 page. This will also give you less risk of encountering issues with updates in the future, as often the overall structure in the main template files like 404.php, page.php, etc, changes.

More info on this topic:

http://dev.themeblvd.com/tutorial/editable-content-files/

[shorthills]

Awesome! Thanks.

[Kjetil]

Hi
This works fine for mistyped url’s (like http://www.dolcevita.no/toscanax), but not if somebody performs a search which doesn’t return anything (like http://www.dolcevita.no/?s=toscanax). Is there a way to make the custom (child theme’s) content-404.php appear there too?
Thanks,
Kjetil
(I mainly use Alyeska, but I guess its just the same setup)

[Jason Bobich]

@Kjetil This is what the content-search.php template file is used for, which is called from within the template file search.php. So, content-search.php is the theme’s specific template part file for when a search brings back no results. You can edit that template part if you like.

You could also filter themeblvd_template_parts to call content-404.php if you really wanted. —

function my_template_parts( $parts ) {
    $parts['search'] = '404';
    return $parts;
}
add_filter( 'themeblvd_template_parts', 'my_template_parts' );

However, WordPress does not work by calling the main 404.php when a search brings back no results. Whether there are results or not, WordPress always triggers search.php. So, it wouldn’t really make sense for theme to call the 404 template part (i.e. content-404.php), as that’s not what it is.

[Kjetil]

Beautiful !
Editing a copy of the content-404.php file (in the child theme folder) worked just as I hoped.
Thanks

[inetinitiatives]

Hi Jason,

Is there any way to easily customize a 404 page for a site which ISN’T using a child theme? For smaller sites in which the Custom CSS dialog and the standard theme options are sufficient for example…

Also, where exactly would the customized text, etc. go within the code that is in the content-404.php file?

[Jason Bobich]

Hello,

I believe you can customize the 404 page text from our String Swap plugin. This is the only way I can think of without PHP customization.

http://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-blvd-string-swap/

[inetinitiatives]

Thanks much, I’ll give that a try.

[Author]

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