TOPIC: WEB PROGRAMMING
Redirecting a WordPress site to its home page when its loop finds no posts
5th November 2022Since I created a bespoke theme for this site, I have been tweaking things as I go. The basis came from the WordPress Theme Developer Handbook, which gave me a simpler starting point shorn of all sorts of complexity that is encountered with other themes. Naturally, this means that there are little rough edges that need tidying over time.
One of these is dealing with errors on the site, like when content is not found. This could be a wrong address or a search query that finds no matching posts. When that happens, there is a redirection to the home page using some simple JavaScript within the loop fallback code enclosed within script start and end tags (including the whole code triggers the action from this post so it cannot be shown here):
location.href="[blog home page ]";
The bloginfo function can be used with the url keyword to find the home page, avoiding hard-coding. For now, this works so long as JavaScript is enabled, but a more robust approach may come in time. It is not possible to do a PHP redirect because of the nature of HTTP: when headers have been sent, it is not possible to do server redirects. At this stage, things become client side, so using JavaScript is one way to go instead.
JavaScript: write it yourself or use a library?
3rd July 2008I must admit that I have never been a great fan of JavaScript. For one thing, its need to interact with browser objects places you at the mercy of the purveyors of such pieces of software. Debugging is another fine art that can seem opaque to the uninitiated, since the amount and quality of the logging is determined by an interpreter not provided by the language's overseers. All in all, it seems to present a steep and obstacle-strewn learning curve to newcomers. As it happens, I have always found server side scripting languages like PHP and Perl to be more to my taste, and I have no aversion at all to writing SQL.
In the late 1990's when I was still using free web hosting, JavaScript probably was the best option for my then new online photo gallery. Whatever was the truth, it certainly was the way that I went. While learning Java or Flash might have been useful, I never managed to devote sufficient time to the task, so JavaScript turned out to be the way forward until I got a taste of server side scripting. Moving to paid hosting allowed for that to develop and the JavaScript option took a back seat.
Based on my experience of the browser wars and working with JavaScript throughout their existence, I was more than a little surprised at the buzz surrounding AJAX. Ploughing part of the way through WROX's Beginning AJAX did nothing to sell the technology to me; it came across as a very dry, jargon-blighted read. Nevertheless, I do see the advantages of web applications being as responsive as their desktop equivalents, but AJAX doesn't always guarantee this; as someone who has seen such applications crawling on IE6, I can certainly vouch for this. In fact, I suspect that may be behind the appearance of technologies such as AIR and Silverlight, so JavaScript may get usurped yet again, just like my move to a photo gallery powered on the server side.
Even with these concerns, using JavaScript to add a spot more interactivity is never a bad thing even if it can be overdone, hence the speed problems that I have witnessed. In fact, I have been known to use DOM scripting, but I need to have the use in mind before I can experiment with a technology; I cannot do it the other way around. Nevertheless, I am keen to see what JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Prototype might have to offer (both have been used in WordPress). Since I have happened on their respective websites, they might make good places to start, and who knows where my curiosity might take me?