Rewrite a plugin's paths to look nicer.
Overview
Plugins are a fantastic and vastly underused tool in CakePHP. If you aren't familiar with plugins take a few minutes to peek at the manual for a great example: http://manual.cakephp.org/chapter/plugins.
One thing you may have noticed in the manual chapter, or in your own plugin, is that the URL paths for plugins are kind of strange if you follow the correct naming conventions of your plugin. For instance, say we have built a Forums plugin consisting of a few controllers, namely `forums_topics` and `forums_posts`. The default base URL's for these controllers are:
/forums/forums_topics /forums/forums_posts
At this point you might say, "Why don't we just rename our `forums_posts` to `posts`?". This is a common move that many people make but consider this (from Section 2 of the Plugins chapter of the manual):
While it isn't required, it is recommended that you name your plugin controllers something relatively unique in order to avoid namespace conflicts with parent applications.
So for the sake of this article and the argument of convention we will keep the names of the controllers how they should be.
Rewriting with bootstrap.php
By using the ./app/config/bootstrap.php we can rewrite the URL before it reaches the dispatcher. (There are a few other handy things you can do with bootstrap.php but that is for another article). Our goal is to take a URL like /forums/posts/view/1 and rewrite it to /forums/forums_posts/view/1 before the dispatcher sees anything (sneeky!).
./app/config/bootstrap.php
Download code
<?php
// set the plugin name and the controllers we want to hack
$rewritePlugins = array(
'forums' => array('posts', 'topics'),
);
// rewrite it!
foreach($rewritePlugins as $plugin=>$options) {
$_GET['url'] = preg_replace('%^('.$plugin.')/('.implode('|', $options).')%i', '\\1/\\1_\\2', $_GET['url']);
}
?>
You should now be able to go to /forums/posts/view/11 and it work correctly!
A few things to note:
- Notice there is not "catch-all" part of this rewrite. If we were to catch all '/forums/catch_this' and rewrite it to '/forums/forums_catch_this' then we wouldn't be able to access anything in the 'forums_controller.php'. So you must define EACH controller you want to rewrite.
- If your plugins are scaffolded all the links that CakePHP generated will be redirected back to the default 'forums_xxxxx'. To CakePHP the URL is actually /forums/forums_posts/view/1 even through the address bar reads /forums/posts/view/1
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