404 Redirect to Main Page

I was looking around for ideas about what to do for 404 redirect for the site. My personal favorite is the “You 404’d it–gnarly, dude” message, but copying that seemed in poor taste for some reason. As I was looking, I stumbled across a solution that didn’t occur to me. It’s simple, elegant, and easy to put into place.

In http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1053249, if you scroll down to a response by ilook, you’ll see the following code:

I’m not sure if ilook is Christopher Carey or not, but kudos to both if they are not one and the same. This is a solution to a problem that I wasn’t aware of. I personally think redirecting to home is a more elegant solution than a 404 page in and of itself, even if you provide a nice message and search on that page.

If you’re wondering where to stick that PHP in a word press site, it goes in your active theme’s folder in the 404.php page. You can edit this through SSH or, if you don’t have access, through the word press control panel’s theme edit section (clicking the 404 page editor on the link at the right).

Cheers!