• Registered: 21 May 2012
  • Posts: 3

Topic: System says it cannot access home page

First, there is an error message that says the system can't guess my home page, to enter it at the end of the URL. So I added /index.php to the URL, producing:  www.domain.com/index.php. That doesn't work either -  a box pops up and says to enter it *exactly* as it appears in a browser which is what I did before without success. This seems contradictory and  makes no sense because the browser loads www.domain.com/ just fine.  In fact,  that's the only way it will load, since a properly set up site will not allow both www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php to load. So as a matter of proper practice there is a 301 redirect from /index.php pointing back to www.domain.com/ to prevent a duplicate URL from occurring, not sure how this should be causing any problem. I sent in an email about this, did not receive an answer after 2 hours, so hoping to get a faster answer here.

  • Registered: 21 May 2012
  • Posts: 3

Re: System says it cannot access home page

OK this keeps getting more confusing.

Before I logged out, I changed the login/pw to some dummy text and tried to run it again. Not login or password error, actually now I get the same exact error message I had before, about the home page can't be guessed. Seriously?

So maybe there was a login/pw problem all along and nothing to do the the URL issue. Not very impressed so far.

  • Registered: 21 Dec 2010
  • Posts: 295

Re: System says it cannot access home page

Hi John, you can't have the 301 redirect on that page. SimpleCMS MUST know the filename of the homepage, e.g. /index.php and if you have that setup as a redirect then it won't know what the URL is, therefore you will continue to see the error message telling you that the system can't guess the homepage! If you remove the 301 then the system will work.

I believe the system checks the filename of the homepage before testing your FTP details, so at this point it won't matter what FTP details you enter.

  • Registered: 21 May 2012
  • Posts: 3

Re: System says it cannot access home page

OK but it is a proper practice to have this redirect. Without it, sometimes Google will see
www.domain.com/index.php
and
www.domain.com/
as being a duplicate of the same content, this hurts rankings. Probably  most people don't know this but proper SEO calls for this type of solution. Can your system be set up to work with canonical redirects?

Last edited by john40 (22 May 2012 13:15:26)

  • Registered: 20 Dec 2010
  • Posts: 180

Re: System says it cannot access home page

Duplicating content is a big issue for Google, but certainly not in the case of index.php/.html etc.

I have personally been working in the SEO field for almost a decade now (probably how you found us in the first place) and this is not something I have ever read about.

Either way, the system works by finding an index page and if that page has a 301 redirect on it, it goes without saying, that this is never going to work.

Not very impressed so far, John.