Automatic routing for page aliases in CakePHP

Question

I am creating a CMS using CakePHP framework. Every page created through CMS will have its unique URL alias, depending also on virtual folder structure, example:

• www.site.com/level-1/about-us
• www.site.com/level-2/our-service

User is available to create its own page, which will initially have the following address: www.site.com/pages/<page_id> and then create URL alias for it www.site.com/<page_alias>

Page aliases are stored in database. How can I configure Routes to reflect these changes automatically, e.g., when CMS user add new page to a website? Having in mind he can also update these aliases in the future via CMS.

Routes file has the following

Router::connect(
    '/pages/**',
    array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'show')
);

Adding every new alias in routes file manually is extremely not convenient. Imagine a news website which will have hundreds of articles with their unique aliases. Is there an elegant solution for this?

Answer 1

You can fetch the aliases from the database and put them in routes. This implementation uses caching to prevent loading the routes on every request.

$menus = ''; 
//Cache::delete('routemenus'); You can uncomment this to delete cache if you change menus 
if($menus = Cache::read('routemenus') === false){ 
    echo 'load from db'; 
    $menusModel = ClassRegistry::init('Menu'); 
    $menus = $menusModel->find('all', array('conditions' => array('parent_id' => '1'))); 
    Cache::write('routemenus', $menus); 
} 

foreach($menus as $menuitem){ 
    Router::connect('/' . $menuitem['Menu']['code'] . '/:action/*', array('controller' => $menuitem['MenuType']['code'], 'action' => 'index')); 
} 

Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'homepage', 'action' => 'index'));

http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/iworm/2010/01/10/how-to-implement-dynamic-route-in-cakephp

Answer 2

We need to check if the page_alias is not the original controller we intended for E.g. if you have StatesController than /states/index should refer to index function rather than a states page_alias . For this you will need to ignore the slugs with controller name or already defined route bases when saving.

Next you will have to identify that if page_alias slug exists You can extend CakeRoute for that.

Check out this http://mark-story.com/posts/view/using-custom-route-classes-in-cakephp It has a very better implementation of things you want to do .