[wp-hackers] Should Monthly Archive Pages ever return 404?

[Casey Bisson]

Are you arguing that the page shouldn't return a 404, or that WP  
should implement some more elegant hooks to handle 404 conditions?

You should take a look inside the WP_Query object. It's written to  
parse every possible legal request URL, and if you hook into in the  
right places, you'll also find opportunities to generate more useful  
404s when either the query parser fails or if the database returns no  
results (as is the case with your example).


--Casey

http://maisonbisson.com
http://scriblio.net


On Mar 9, 2009, at 2:38 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> The problem with a "helpful 404 page" is that such a 404 page must  
> know about all potential error states in a system to be helpful vs.  
> allowing the pages that already know about "the error states" to  
> take action.  It would seem to me a lot more appropriate for a page  
> to be able to "punt" and say "Ya know, I consider this a 404" if it  
> wants to trigger such a use case rather than having to modify the  
> 404 for every potential error situation.


On Mar 9, 2009, at 2:28 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> While I will certainly concede the point if most others feel it is  
> semantically reasonable here are the two ways to look at it:
>
> 1.) The lack of posts imply there is no valid resource at the  
> requested URI, or
> 2.) The lack of posts is simply a reportable state for a valid  
> resource at the requested URI.
>