cakephp routing for cushycms preview link

I have a set of rather static pages wich I moved to the views/pages folder. The resulting *.ctp files are editable by my customer through CushyCMS (simplistic cms perfect for dummy proof editing). However CushyCMS generated preview links that obviously don't take CakePHP into account. I would like to solve this little problem with custom routing, but can't get my head around the details..

How can I dynamically connect the url http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/views/pages/test.ctp to http://localhost:8888/cake1开发者_开发百科25/pages/test?

I added the following in my routes.php:

Router::connect('/pages/test.ctp', array(
  'controller' => 'pages',
  'action' => 'display', 'test'));

This works ok for connecting: http://localhost:8888/cake125/pages/test.ctp to http://localhost:8888/cake125/pages/test. Somehow following snibbet doesn't do the trick:

Router::connect('/app/views/pages/test.ctp', array(
  'controller' => 'pages',
  'action' => 'display', 'test'));

Ideally I'd like to have a single Router::connect statement which connects all /app/views/pages/*.ctp requests to the right place.

Finally I would also like to correctly handle google search results for the old version of the site. Like so:

Router::connect('/test.html', array(
   'controller' => 'pages',
   'action' => 'display', 'test'));

This works ok but I'd rather have anypage.html connect to /pages/anypage. Can anyone help with this?

Thanks in advance!

First, by virtue of having Cake in a subdirectory (/cake125), I think you may need to connect the /cake125/:controller/:action, rather than how you have it. Not 100%, though; Cake might be robust enough to handle that use case. If you have weird errors, I'd check that.

On with my answer: I think you are somewhat misunderstanding how the Router class works. You connect URLs, not relative filesystem paths, using Router::connect. By default (which you may have erased, but it's pretty simple to fix), Cake will route requests to /pages/* to the PagesController::display() function, passing it one argument (the action listed in the http request).

So, to have the pages controller map /pages/one to the app/views/pages/one.ctp element, simply make sure that the following (default, i.e. Cake normally has this setup) line is in the routes config (and make sure that lines above it do not match that pattern):

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

This should ensure that PagesController::display( $action ) is invoked during the request, which is (I think) what you're after.

If your CMS generates preview links that you want to correctly re-route, I'd suggest adding a new route. E.g., if your CMS generates links like http://somesite.com/cms/preview/newly_edited_file, you can route it like this:

Router::connect( '/cms/preview/:action', array( 'controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', :action );

For your second question: have a default rule in your routes (make it the last rule, and have it match *). It will then be configured to route all not found requests to your controller/action pair as requested. Try this:

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

Major caveat this will break your existing routes. You will need to manually add an entry for each of your existing controllers (Router::connect( '/users/:action', ...etc...). If you google around you can find some clever solutions, such as having that list generated at runtime for you. But you will need to address "normal" routing, once you've added that catch-all (and make sure your catch-all is at the end of the routing file).

Also, if you want to parse URLs like /test.html, simply add a call to Router::parseExtensions(...) so that Cake will register .html as an extension for it to parse. Check the manual on that function for more info.

As others have pointed out how CakePHP Router works, I'll leave it at that.

For the second part of your question (handling old links), I'd suggest adding this to the end of your Routes list:

Router::connect( '/:page', 
    array (
        'controller' => 'pages', 
        'action' => 'display',
    ), 
    array (
        'pass' => array ('page'),    // to pass the page as first arg to action
        'page' => '.+\.html$',       // to verify that it ends with .html
    )
);

You'd unfortunately have to parse out the .html yourself though

How can I dynamically connect the url http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/views/pages/test.ctp to http://localhost:8888/cake125/pages/test?

Well, the thing is, you don't. :-)

What I mean by that is, you do not connect a URL to another URL. What you really do is, you make certain URLs trigger certain Controller functions (or Actions for short) which in turn may (or may not) render certain Views. By default it's all straight forward through naming conventions. The URL /foo/bar triggers the Controller Foo's Action bar and renders the View /views/foo/bar.ctp.

The PagesController is already a special case. The URL /pages/foo triggers the Controller Pages's Action display, passes it the parameter foo, which renders the View /views/pages/foo.ctp. Notice the difference in which Action is triggered.

Since there are a lot of steps inbetween, it's not a given that a certain URL corresponds to a particular file on the hard disk. The URL /foo/bar might trigger Controller Baz' Action doh which renders the View /views/narf/glob.ctp.

This makes translating http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/views/pages/test.ctp to render the file /views/pages/test.ctp somewhere between an uncertainty and a pain in the rear.

Edit:

Having said that, the particular problem in your case is that the base URL is http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/. You can invoke a Cake app from http://localhost:8888/cake125/, http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/ or http://localhost:8888/cake125/app/webroot. All three URLs will be handled by the same file cake125/app/webroot/index.php, if you use one of the shorter URLs the request will be "forwarded" (rewritten) via .htaccess rules.

So the Route you're trying to connect, the Route that Cake sees, is actually /views/pages/test.ctp.

Actually, my mistake, this might not be the problem, but it depends on your .htaccess files and server configuration.

It doesn't seem to make much sense in a CMS though, since every newly created page would need its own rule. So I'd recommend against trying to do so and rather hack Cushy to properly construct URLs using the Cake HtmlHelper or Router::url(). Failing that, connect all URLs with a catch-all rule to some Action, parse the URL there and render the correct View "manually".

Alternatively, use .htaccess files and rewrite rules to actually rewrite the URL into a normal Cake URL, so Cake doesn't have to worry about it. As said above though, this can be very fragile.