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Expression Engine- Show HTML within entries loop even if no results

New to Expression Engine. I have the following code:

    {exp:channel:entries channel="blogposts" orderby="date" url_title="{segment_3}" limit="1"}

        <div id="cat_head_section">
            <div id="cat_title">
                <div id="lower_bubble_heading" class="cat_title"><h5>{title}</h5></div>
            </div>
        </div>

        <div id="category_main">


            {if no_results}
                <h2>Sorry, the post you were looking for either does not exist or has been deleted.</h2>
            {/if}

            {url_title}


        </div>

    {/exp:channel:entries}

When there are no results returned, I don't get any of the HTML returned (other than the heading), which is vital to the structure of the page. How do I solve this?

Thanks.

Solution

  • This answer assumes that the entry call you are making here is the main one on the page. If this call is really just for a sidebar or something then this answer may not apply.

    Couple of things...

    1. If you are building urls like EE "expects" you to you shouldn't have to specify which url segment to look for the url title. The 'url_title' parameter is generally useful when you are doing something that EE does not expect, such loading a specific entry other than the one that appears in the last segment.

    2. If you are limiting your result to one entry, there's no need to specify an order.

    3. Maybe the reason you think you need the 'url_title=' parameter is because you haven't taken a good look at 'require_entry='.

    So we are down to this:

    {exp:channel:entries channel="blogposts" limit="1" require_entry="yes"}

    Now on to your question:

    Think about why and how someone would end up asking for a page that you can't find.

    Did the entry get deleted? Did someone retweet a mal-formed URL?

    A. You may say these requests really call out for 404 response.

    Serving a true 404 instead of a valid page with a "Sorry..." message ensures that the bad page will not be indexed by search engines...

    To handle this you want EE's redirect tag.

    {if no_results}
{redirect="404"}
{/if}

    You'll want to have a genuinely helpful 404 page if you do this.

    B. Alternatively you may say that when an entry can't be found you already have in mind a 'next best place' to sent the visitor -- better than your site's 404 page.

    So if your visitor is looking for a blog entry that doesn't exist (say: /blog/entry/bad_page) the best place to send them would be to your blog index page (say: /blog). If you care about search ranking, then to the extent that the inbound link that is breaking had some SEO value, a 301 redirect here will help to confer that SEO value on to the page to which you are redirecting.

    {if no_results}
{redirect='blog/' status_code="301"}
{/if}