Create a 404 error page and win a Toolset subscription

   Agnes Bury

Announcements

June 28, 2017
17

Use our Toolset training site and create your own 404 error page using Toolset plugins. See how it feels to build websites using Toolset and win a Toolset subscription!

What to do

Your task is to use Toolset to build a 404 error page on the Toolset training site.

  1. Launch a Toolset training site
  2. Go to the Error 404 layout and customize it (see the video)
  3. Submit your work using this form.

Example of a 404 error page
Example of a 404 error page

Here’s an example of a 404 error page:
http://test-toolset.discover-wp.com/fff

Here are step-by-step instructions how you can build a 404 error page using Toolset.

Your 404 error page can include anything you wish. A good 404 error page provides visitors with interesting links or features to keep them on the site. A search maybe? Well, we’re sure you know best!

We recommend using at least one View.

Who can participate

Types plugin users are welcome to join, WPML users too, in fact anyone who doesn’t already have a Toolset subscription is welcome!

Deadline

The competition will be open from today (Wednesday, June 28th) until Monday, July 3rd 2017, 8am Central European Time (Berlin time). We will review all entries, announce the most interesting ones, the winners, and award the prizes on July 10th (Wednesday).

 

The contest is closed, check the results

Prizes

We hope you’ll have fun participating and seeing the ideas shared will be rewarding in themselves. But there are some prizes too.

Toolset Subscription

There is a prize for the author of the most interesting page: a Toolset Basic subscription (worth $69). The package includes the following plugins:

  • Types
  • Views
  • Layouts
  • Maps
  • Access
  • CRED
  • WooCommerce Views
  • Module Manager
  • Framework Installer

and access to the Toolset Professional Support forum.

Toolset T-shirt

From among all the participants we will also randomly award a unique Toolset T-shirt.
The Toolset T-shirt is the last one we have. We won’t produce new ones so you can consider it vintage (but it’s new of course).

Toolset T-shirt to be awarded by lottery
Toolset T-shirt to be awarded by lottery

Need help? Questions?

Agnes, the competition organizer
Agnes, the competition organizer

If you have any questions, feel free to ask using comments here or on our Facebook page.

I’ll be happy to answer all.

Agnes

 

Comments 17 Responses

  1. I got lifetime toolset but got to buy lifetime WPML 🙂 if I win lifetime WPML i’ll do the challenge ahah

    • Hi Alessio,
      good to know you would be interested if the WPML subscription was at stake. We didn’t plan to offer WPML subscriptions as prizes (and I don’t think we should change the rules on the fly) but actually that’s the first time we are organising a competition for non-Toolset customers and every lesson we learn is a valuable one.

      If we see it generated a lot of interest, we do more stuff like this. Thanks for your feedback!

      • Nice. I plan to buy lifetime WPML in 1-2months so I doubt there will be a challenge in this small timeframe

  2. It seems you need to do some work on your CRM as I too am already a lifetime developer subscriber but got the invite to the contest at the email address I use for my Toolset account.

    If you do a future contest that awards Author Accounts and allows existing Lifetime Toolset subscribers to participate I’m interested.

    • You are right. The invitation was supposed to be sent to users who are not our customers (don’t have the Toolset subscription). Our apologies. We do need to review our email database. I hope we won’t have many cases like yours. The good thing is that now we know you are interested in participating a future contest that awards Author Accounts. Thank you for your feedback Scott. Best regards. Agnes

  3. +1 … I have a Lifetime Toolset license. It is likely that the email was sent to everyone.

    • Michael, by “+1” you mean you would be interested in joining a future contest that awards Author Accounts? For sure, the email wasn’t sent to everyone. There might be some cases where Toolset customers belong to more than one segment in our mailing system. I’ll check your case with our admins as well and we’ll sort that out not to make the same mistake in the future. Sorry, our apologies.

      Please let me know if you are interested in any contests for Toolset subscribers.

  4. This is a cool contest. I liked the punch line on T-shirt don’t be a tool use TOOLSET.

    • Thanks! So you need to send us a link to your site. We will randomly award that T-shirt from among all the participants, doesn’t matter how your 404 error page looks like – you just need to change something in the default one. And of course I hope you don’t already have a Toolset subscription since this contest is meant for folks who don’t have a Toolset subscription.

      I’ve checked the links we’ve got so far and cannot see yours. But you still have time. Looking forward to see your submission 🙂

  5. The problem with complex 404 pages is they put a lot of strain on the DB.

    It is possible to generate a lot of traffic to a 404 page. And your example has at least 7 loops on it to generate the various content types. I guess if you were to cache the entire content area or each result in a transient, you could avoid this,

    Also you are also returning the page for missing images.
    http://test-toolset.discover-wp.com/fff.gif for example,
    Make sure you use .htaccess to stop 404 pages for images, style sheets, JS, etc

    If you site is getting a lot of 404 errors, to the point where users are being impact, it is a better idea to redirect the page to something meaningful or fix the bad links.

    Fancy 404 pages are nice in theory, but really can result in poor server performance if you are not careful. Static 404 pages that do not use a DB or even load the wordpress core are much faster and will not result in your server performance being impacted when you have a lot of them

    • Thank for your your comment Andrew. You are right. Caching would be a must to consider when you are going to use a lot of queries. Views are cached automatically, when possible. When you insert a View shortcode using our GUI, the Caching tab has the option “Use the cached version if it is available” checked by default.

  6. Hi!

    I am triying to add ccs styles in “Layouts CSS and JS Editor” section, but dont works, Why? 🙁

    • Hello Gustaw,
      thank you for your comment. I happy that you would like to participate. I’m sorry but changing the rules on the fly would be unfair to those who were in hurry to meet the deadline. That was the first content we organised for users who are not Toolset customers. We didn’t even know if anybody would be interested. Now, when we see that so many people are eager to join we will do more stuff like this. I’m sure you will have a chance. Just follow us on our Toolset Facebook page. Thanks a again for your note. Best regards.