Tag: cakephp router

Dealing with static pages v2 (or… 3?)

March 15th, 2011 · · CakePHP 13 comments - Tags: , , ,

Over the years of cake development we’ve seen a number of ways to get rid of the the /pages/ path in the URL for static pages.

By default if you create an “about us” page, such as in app/views/pages/about.ctp, the resulting URL would be:
www.example.com/pages/about

I’m sure you’ve seen a ton of complaints and solutions about how to get rid of this seemingly “annoying” /pages/…
To keep the URL’s clean, most people would obviously prefer to have www.example.com/about instead. (No /pages/ in sight).

Recently, my favorite solution has become the following setting in the routes.php:

$staticPages = array(
    'about',
    'legal',
    'policy',
    'something'
);

$staticList = implode('|', $staticPages);

Router::connect('/:static', array(
    'plugin' => false,
    'controller' => 'pages',
    'action' => 'display'), array(
        'static' => $staticList,
        'pass' => array('static')
        )
    );

Go ahead, create your about.ctp and then attempt to access it by going to www.yoursite.com/about

The Router will nicely remove the /pages/ from the URL.

Q.
Why keep the pages in the array() and then use implode()? Couldn’t I just have the following?

$staticList = 'about|legal|policy|something';

A.
You sure could, but array structure allows to keep things organized neater and if you have a large amount of pages it’s easier to scan visually to insert/remove pages as necessary. Either way, you have both options to work with.

Overriding default URL's (aka persistent routes)

December 8th, 2009 · · CakePHP No comments - Tags: , , ,

CakePHP’s routes allow for an easy way to serve content by using URL aliases.

Let’s take an example from the manual:

Router::connect(
    '/cooks/:action/*', array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'index')
);

By having the user access the URL such as example.com/cooks/index simply shows the default view for example.com/users/index (as was our intention).

However, if you have a bunch of links on that page, which point to other actions in the Users controller, the URL’s will remain as example.com/users/some_other_action. In some cases it may not be desired, i.e. if a visitor entered the section of your site by using the “cooks” URL, you don’t want to suddenly confuse them by presenting a completely different link to other actions. Otherwise, you may simply wish to be consistent (or sneaky).

A simple override of the Helper::url() method allows us to solve this problem.
(Place the following in your app_helper.php)

public function url($url = NULL, $full = FALSE) {
  if(strstr($this->params['url']['url'], 'cooks') && $url['controller'] == 'users') {
    $url['controller'] = 'cooks';
  }

  return parent::url($url, $full);
}

That’s it, now any link that would otherwise point to example.com/users/some_other_action will now point to example.com/cooks/some_other_action.

p.s. You might want to add an additional check: isset($url['controller'])