M1: Error 404 when adding product in second root category with multi-website

[alentsch]

I am a Magento rookie, so please bear with me ...

I have created two websites with two domains and two root categories on Magento 1.9.2.4 (running on Apache 2.4): "site.com" (website 1) and "store2.site.com" (website 2). website 1 is assigned root category A and website 2 uses root category B. Both categories each have each one sub-category and there are  4 sample products. website 1 (site.com) runs fully normal.

PROBLEM: When I add a product to category B (website 2), I get an "Error 404: Page not found." as soon as I click on the sub-category link in the menu!!! I have flushed the cache and re-indexed a "zillion" times and spent the whole day Googling for a possible solution :-(

If the sub-category in category B is empty, I get the proper message "There are no products matching the selection" and the sub-category description is also shown corretly. All other page links on "store2.site.com" work correctly as well.

If I switch the root categories between the two websites, "site.com" shows the products of category B correctly. That means something must be wrong with my website 2 "store2.site.com" which shows "Error 404" also with category A, which worked well before being switched. I am using the same theme template for both websites.

Does anyone have some clues or hints for me, what I could have messed up with my setup and how I could debug? No error messages are shown in the Magento or Apache logs.

Thank you for your help in advance - I am totally lost!!

[alentsch · Accepted solution]

The issue is resolved!

The culprit has been a wrong "CMS Home Page" (System > Configuration > General > Web > Default Pages > CMS Home Page. However, I consider the true reason to be a small bug, because the correct CMS Home Page had always been specified for the scope of the website 2 (Current Configuration Scope selection on the top left). HOWEVER this definition did NOT propagate and override the CMS Home Page of the underlying web views of website 2, which I find rather illogic. To resolve the issue it was therefore necessary to specify the CMS Home Page for each single scope of the web views of website 2. After that all runs as well and expected.

Hope this that might help someone who is stuck with the same problem ;-)