After removing index.php from URLs, 404s on every template except homepage

Question

UPDATE

When first posting this, I didn't understand the problem. When I removed the index.php from the urls with a .htaccess file (http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/urls/remove_index.php.html), all the templates other than the homepage all gave 404s.

ORIGINAL POST

I've create a list of the channel entries, but when you click on a link it sends you to the url example.com/title-permalink= and throws up a 404.

I've tried to visit the single entry pages by manually putting in the url but it doesn't work either.

Here's the simple code on the index page.

<ul>
   {exp:channel:entries channel="essays"}
      <li><a href="title-permalink="site/essay"}">{title}</a></li>
   {/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

And the single entry page.

{exp:channel:entries channel="essays"}
   <h1>{title}</h1>
   {body}
{/exp:channel:entries}

I haven't had this problem before. It seems like it must be really simple. What am I missing? Something in the settings?

Answer 1

You are missing the opening { on the href's tag, and {title_permalink} has an underscore _ not a dash.

<li><a href="{title_permalink="site/essay"}">{title}</a></li>

See EE Docs on Permalinks

Answer 2

On single entry pages that aren't throwing 404's EE is falling back to the template group's index.html page.

To fix:

Add this to the top of your detail page template. Adjust the segment to a number AFTER your URL Title displays:

{if segment_3 != ""}
  {redirect="404"}
{/if}

And on single entry pages you should do this to trigger 404's when EE can't find an entry so that it does not fallback to the index.html template in the template group. Adjust the segment to your URL Title segment:

{exp:channel:entries
  channel="ch_blog"
  limit="1"
  require_entry="yes"
  url_title="{segment_2}"
  status="open"
  disable="{gv_param_disable_default}"
  dynamic="no"
}

Finally, add these to your .htaccess file (where /index.php/site/404 points to your 404 template):

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php/site/404

<FilesMatch "(\.jpe?g|gif|png|bmp|css|js|flv)$">
  ErrorDocument 404 "File Not Found"
</FilesMatch>

That should do it!

Answer 3

The real problem: After trying to remove the index.php from the urls with a .htaccess file (http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/urls/remove_index.php.html), all the templates other than the homepage all gave 404s. I looked around, tried lots of different versions of the .htaccess code, and this one it worked. https://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/a/871/3177

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond $1 !^/index.php
RewriteCond $1 !.(css|js|png|jpe?g|gif|ico)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

It worked on both my local build with MAMP and my hosting on Bluehost, both in sub-directories.