Bending The Pages Module - Any Ideas?
Development and Programming
I wanted to get this out there and see if anyone had any ideas. I’m trying to figure out how to bens the current Pages module to do some something I miss from Tome (what used to be the ages module).
I’d like to make it so that a “listing” (aka traditional-style blog or news page) could live on a “page” and the comment page url (or search results url as set under prefs) would connect through and appear to live in a directory under it. I’d like to not use the traditional EE template system of template_group/template so that the single entry appears to stay within the same URL hierarchy. Hope that makes sense.
I’ve tried altering the weblog prefs to have the full page hierarchy, but it throws an error since there’s not a page url assigned to that single entry. I’ve also tried faking it through the template system where there’s a template called “path/im/trying/to/mimic”, but it shows up blank. I’m assuming the engine just doesn’t know how to handle template names with “/” in them.
Demo page: http://rockthenroll.com/about/sub1/subsub1/subsubsub1
If you have a template group and template matching the first two segments, use URI segments for everything else, and use the url_title= parameter and dynamic=”off” for the entries tags on that landing page using the last segment to populate that. So in your above example, you’d have a template group named ‘about’, one named ‘sub1’, and you’d ignore all other URI segments except the last one, which you’d use in the url_title parameter.
ExpressionEngine is designed for your “directory” structure to be defined by your template groups and templates, and the intent of the Pages module is not to supplant or expand that, but to give content authors the ability to create landing locations without them needing to edit and create templates. So you are indeed swimming past the buoys.
Thanks for the reply! WHat do you think about extending the module to do what I’m saying? Possible? Or would it not work?
The system actually maps the URLs before any module processing, so it could be done, but without incorporating a system hack, you would also need to combine it with an extension - one of the weblog entries tags hooks, and perhaps a session hook to alter the URI back to a “real” pages URI without the extra segment(s).
rockthenroll - just a thought, if the Tome module more suits what you’re trying to achieve why don’t you still use it?
Haha guess I should have mentioned that. There’s still a few things I’d like developed even past Tome and my team is looking at something custom to do exactly what we want. This questions was posted to find out the validity of extending Pages or just starting over to do so.
Thanks!
For anyone interested, we built a module from the ground up to take care of some of these issues and more: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/91290/