Some of the TYPO3 sites that I’m responsible for maintaining, have login restricted pages. Normally, when a non-logged in user visits these pages, they’ll get shown a 404 page. That’s not at all helpful to them.

Bad, Bad, Bad UX – No Biscuit For You

Instead, do the simple act of showing the user a login page, that upon a successful login redirects them to the originally requested page.

Good UX – Do You Want Your Tummy Rubbed?

It’s easy to do this redirect action with a couple of edits to your typo3conf/localconf.php and by creating a custom PHP script called pageNotFoundHandling.php.

In typo3conf/localconf.php place the following code.

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['curlUse'] = '1';
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['FE']['pageNotFound_handling'] = 'USER_FUNCTION:fileadmin/scripts/pageNotFoundHandling.php:user_pageNotFound->pageNotFound';

curlUse is required since our pageNotFoundHandling.php script uses curl. Otherwise, our whole show login and redirect effort won’t work.

Placing pageNotFoundHandling.php in fileadmin/scripts isn’t required, but recommended if you don’t already have such a spot for custom scripts.

What’s in pageNotFoundHandling.php?

<?php
define(LOGIN_URL, 'http://www.example.com/login');
define(NOTFOUND_URL, 'http://www.example.com/page-not-found');

class user_pageNotFound {
  function pageNotFound($param, $ref) {
    if ($param['pageAccessFailureReasons']['fe_group'] != array(''=>0)) {
      header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden');
      $url = LOGIN_URL.'?redirect_url=' . $param['currentUrl'];
    } else {
      $url = NOTFOUND_URL;
    }

    session_start();
    $strCookie = 'PHPSESSID=' . $_COOKIE['PHPSESSID'] . '; path=/';
    session_write_close();

    $c = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $strCookie);
    $contents = curl_exec($c);
    curl_close($c);

    if ($contents) return $contents;
        else return FALSE;
  }
}
?>

After creating your pageNotFoundHandling.php script, make sure to edit the LOGIN_URL and NOTFOUND_URL definitions to your own login and 404 pages.

Bonus points…

What’s UX? UX is short for user experience. A user experience leads to the way a person feels about using a product, system or service.

Therefore…

Bad UX ≠ Recommendations, Sales & Trust

Thank you FazzyX for your excellent code samples leading to this solution.

Have critiques, questions, trouble or thanks? Please leave a comment, I’ll respond.

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