Issue with 404 page

[dhananjaygbhardwaj]

Hello Bill,

Let me start by thanking you for this starter theme. It has been a huge part of my learning curve towards WordPress theme development.

I recently came across a weird issue while working on an ongoing project. I couldn't report with a live URL for now, but I was able to reproduce the same behavior over at your personal website.

As an example, let's take this specific page: https://www.billerickson.net/favicon-dark-mode/

Simply right click any image within the content and open it in a new tab.

Remove the image's file extension from the address bar of the browser and hit enter.

Such as, from this:
https://www.billerickson.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dark-mode.jpg

To this:
https://www.billerickson.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dark-mode

This should (in my opinion) return a 404 error (it does get a 404 response from the server) and use the theme's inc/archive-none.php partial to display the default not found message.

However, to my surprise, it returns a page with a list of posts.

I am not entirely sure if it's an issue or intended behavior.

[billerickson]

That's interesting. It seems like the subdirectories in the URL change how WP runs its query.

https://www.billerickson.net/asdf
is_404() = true and has_posts() = false

https://www.billerickson.net/asdf/asdf
is_404() = true and has_posts() = false

https://www.billerickson.net/wp-content/uploads/asdf
is_404() = true and has_posts() = true

Inside ea_default_loop() we only check if has_posts() to run the loop. If no posts exist, we check if this is a 404 or an empty search query.

I'll dig in more later to figure out why this isn't working as expected.