joomla 3.3.6 404 article not found

Question

A client has made a minor change to his joomla site, and now the whole site is displaying 404 article not found. He said that he created an article, deleted it, and created a new article with the same name. That's it.
How can I resolve this problem without knowing which article is causing the problem?

Answer 1

What I would suggest you do is firstly delete the article properly. In the Article Manager, set the status to trashed which will display all deleted articles. Select the article your client removed and delete it properly.

Then, go to your Menu Manager, open the menu item that was associated with this article, and select it again, then save the menu item.

Should now work.

When you delete an article, it removes the association from the menu item, so even if you create another article with the same name, you still need to assign it to the menu item.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

It turns out that somehow the "uncategorized" category was deleted, while there were still articles published in that category. This caused the whole site to break.

I don't think it had anything to do with the actual article that my client had edited. That's just the only thing he remembered doing.

Lesson learned: do not delete categories with articles still in them. (Why can't joomla just not let you do that?)