Need Help with 404 error

Question

Hello,
I have completed the local folder, tesing server, and remote server setup correctly  (i think so).
My testing setup and files shown below:
My local folder for site shown below:
My advanced settings shown below:
I have downloaded all the files to the local folder from my remote server which are working fine on the live website http://www.caremoreconstruction.co.uk.
No layouts of the files/folders etc have been changed, I simply moved them over from the FTP server in to local folder I had created.
Just to confirm I have XAMPP installed and Apache runnining.
When I open DW CS5 and select the index.php file form the FILES tab, the main home page opens up and I little bar comes up at the top and says "This page has server proccesing directives that design view cannot display. Switch to Live View".
So I click on Live View and the home page loads up. I then press ctrl and click one of the links. (See picture below)
For some reason I am getting the following error message when I click on my links.
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.
If you think this is a server error, please contact thewebmaster.
Error 404
localhost
12/30/10 11:58:51
Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1
Please can someone help me!!
Regards
James

Answer 1

David,
This is the responce I have had from my website designer.
Happy new year to you also.  Re Dreamweaver it’s not a tool we use I’m afraid, we generally use tools like Netbeans and code oriented text editors so I’m not best placed to advise on the config of it. I have used it back in 2003, it’s a great development platform, but I just ended up working with other tools.
Looking at the post though, you seem to have got the site running but the issue seems to be the friendly URLs. As David correctly identified, .htaccess and mod_rewrite are used to effect this. If you don’t have the correct .htaccess file in place this aspect of the navigation won’t work.  You should also be running the site from the root directory – both the production (live) website and our development environments are setup in this way, so though I don’t think we implement root relative URIs in the site navigation, I can’t say there won’t be issues running it in a subdirectory off http://locahost without reviewing all the code, which I haven’t.
The .htaccess file you need is on your live website, but many FTP clients will not display this by default, so your FTP download may have missed it.
You can create it yourself, it needs the following directives.  The “.” on the front of the filename is very important.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
That should solve your navigation issue, providing the Apache mod_rewrite module is enabled.  If it doesn’t I can’t really help you further, other than to suggest you get a second hosting account online.  I seem to think you can use a remote development environment in Dreamweaver.  The advantage here is that you’ll have an environment that you know to work, with all the components installed.  No disrespect, but even we can spend ages configuring our development servers to work as we need, and much depends on the installation approach you use in setting up Apache, PHP and MySQL
Re the database, as David has sussed there is no MySQL database to concern yourself with. Other red herrings include login and register handlers which are not implemented.  Your original brief included the possibility of a customer login to access your quotes & progress reports down the line, so we allowed for that in the initial build and planned for MySQL access but didn’t implement those features.
Hope that helps. Great to see how far you’ve come with this – I probably couldn’t get as far building in the same time! Also glad to see that the comments re the code and structure are good – it’s always interesting to see what another developer, who obviously knows his stuff, thinks of your code!!
Regards
Oliver Phillips
http://www.eantics.co.uk
OMG ITS WORKING NOW!!!!!
1. Move all files and folders for the website to the main root directory http://localhost/
2. Open notepad and copy/paste code above in to note pad.
3. Click Save As from files menu. Change save format to all files and call it .htaccess (dont forget to put the ''.'' before htaccess)
4. Move .htaccess file to the root directory of the local/testing site.
and that's it!
There is just one small problem, I have had to move the XAMPP folder out of the root directory http://localhost for the links to work in DW CS5. When I first tried the link on my home page (both in DW CS5 and Browser) it redirected me to the XAMPP home page.
I think the solution for this would be to put XAMPP back in http://localhost/xampp and move website file and folders to vhost.