The 'Shared Web Hosting' Control Panel allows you to edit some error pages to show custom messages for the following errors :

401 Unauthorized
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
500 Internal Server Error

These are handy but if you change the look of your site frequently it can be tedious going in each time and editing them. Mainly because they are .shtml and although they do allow includes it would be easier if we could point it to our own php or perl scripts to handle the work. I was told via a support ticket there wasn't a way to do this but then I checked into Apache's .htaccess feature and it had a command for handling this kind of thing. Just put the following line in your .htaccess file in your root public_html directory:

ErrorDocument # /scriptpath

Example:

ErrorDocument 404 /scripts/404.php

The example above will handle any 404 Not Found Error by sending the result of the 404.php script in the /scripts directory to the user. That script can show a sitemap, display a message to help the visitor find what they are looking for, even redirect them to the homepage.

Hope that helps someone

Thats a nice post. Thanks for sharing that with everyone Scott.

I'm doing this at evedev too. Pretty amusing custom errors too, if you happen to run across them.