Error pages/Web Authentication

[HTF]

I've set try_files to .html & .php locations as advised by Maxim and
everything works fine except "index.html" - it's still pointing to Nginx
error page instead of Joomla 404 error page. Is there a way to fix
this?

Can someone explain to me what's the difference between "location =
/index.php" and "location ~ \.php$" and why the fist one is trying to
open/download files in the web browser.

I still can't get the web authentication to work with MD5 or SHA
encryption. I think that I'm missing some module to support this.

Thanks for help so far.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,205299,205719#msg-205719