Display a view for 404 error in CodeIgniter

Question

The CodeIgniter has a very simple default error 404 message:

404 Page Not Found
The page you requested was not found.

Instead of using this

Answer 1

There is quite a bit of information on this.

http://maestric.com/doc/php/codeigniter_404

http://www.nickyeoman.com/blog/apache/90-htaccess-404-page

http://hasitha.posterous.com/customising-error-pages-on-codeigniter (archived)

Answer 2

Including headers and footers in the default error 404 page seems to be a common problem for CodeIgniter users. I would like to add this link: Simon Emms's comments at http://www.simonemms.com/2011/05/06/codeigniters-404-override-problem/ because he describes the problem so clearly. I have tried the suggestions at http://maestric.com/doc/php/codeigniter_404 and played around with Simon Emms's ideas, and others, but just can't implement them. I'm a bit of a novice at PHP and CodeIgniter, so that might be because of ignorance. That said, it is difficult to ensure that you put the suggested subclasses in the right places and configure, for instance, routes.php correctly. After 3 days of trying the various rather complicated ideas, it occurred to me that I could just use an include statement in the default error 404 page. The only difficulty was figuring out the path to pass to the include statement. In /system/core/Exceptions.php line 146, I found the CodeIgniter developers use APPPATH. You then just have to append the path to the header and footer pages you want to include. My new default error 404 page now looks like this:

<?php
include APPPATH.'/views/templates/header.php';
?>
<div id="container">
    <h1><?php echo $heading; ?></h1>
    <?php echo $message; ?>
</div>
<?php
include APPPATH.'/views/templates/footer.php';
?>

This seems a much easier solution to me than trying to change the core classes in CodeIgniter.

Answer 3

You should change your routes.php. For example:

in application/config/routes.php

$route['404_override'] = 'welcome/_404';

in application/controllers/welcome.php

function _404(){
    $this->load->view("my404_view");
}

And this should be sufficient in the current version of CI.