I had a trouble with a remote magento installation.

After all things went well at installation phase I just managed to configure something on magento backend and, at certain undetermined moment, I have received a very strange behavior. All http requests to my site were redirected to the error page 404. By surfing on the internet, I have read many things about 404 issues of magento freshing installation and I have founded two main solutions for this problem:

1) Check if my http.conf apache server config file has the param AllowOverride at All and not none
2) Open index.php and change Mage::run($mageRunCode, $mageRunType); into Mage::run(‘default’);

The second thing has helped me to restore the website temporary. Sometimes you can have this problem when you change a category or something else (I have read), I don’t know which is the real depth reason why magento start to fire this error page at a given moment. Infact it’s difficul to solve this problem just because it could happen following a basic normal operation and you start thinking that the problem is the last thing you have done in magento (like just add a simple category), but the reason may stay before!

So I started to analyze all my previous operations. The first thing I did with a fresh installation was to create four store views and two stores on just one website. At  the first time I  created five store views and than I deleted one because was useless for my needs. I thought this was the real cause magento went broken, the reason was because I left a default store without a store view.  Infact when I restored my original index.php all things worked like before.

So, after this experience, I have learned that when you have a mass redirection of 404.php in your magento store you can temporary solve with the two above solutions and than looking for the real reason. In most cases all operation that manage block of store operations like store manager, url rewriting etc… are the cause of this kind of problem.

Magento is a very nice structured cms, but is still largely bugged (or there are many thing unchecked) and it requires to be cautious in what you do in it.