Codeigniter - best routes configuration for CMS?

Question

I would like to create a custom CMS within Codeigniter, and I need a mechanism to route general pages to a default controller - for instance:

mydomain.com/about
         


        

Answer 1

You are in luck. I am developing a CMS myself and it took me ages to find a viable solution to this. Let me explain myself to make sure that we are on the same page here, but I am fairly certain that we area.

Your URLS can be formatted the following ways:

http://www.mydomain.com/about - a top level page with no category
http://www.mydomain.com/services/maintenance - a page with a parent category
http://www.mydomain.com/services/maintenace/server-maintenance - a page with a category and sub category.

In my pages controller I am using the _remap function that basically captures all requests to your controllers and lets you do what you want with them.

Here is my code, commented for your convenience:

uri->uri_string();
        $segments = explode("/", $segments);

        // Remove blank segments from array
            foreach($segments as $key => $value) {
               if($value == "" || $value == "NULL") {
                   unset($segments[$key]);
               }
            }

            // Store our newly filtered array segments
            $segments = array_values($segments); 

            // Works out what segments we have
            switch (count($segments))
            {
                // We have a category/subcategory/page-name
                case 3:
                    list($cat, $subcat, $page_name) = $segments;
                break;

                // We have a category/page-name
                case 2:
                    list($cat, $page_name) = $segments;
                    $subcat = NULL;
                break;

                // We just have a page name, no categories. So /page-name
                default:
                    list($page_name) = $segments;
                    $cat = $subcat = NULL;
                break;
            }

        if ($cat == '' && $subcat == '') {

            $page  = $this->mpages->fetch_page('', '', $page_name);

        } else if ($cat != '' && $subcat == '') {

            $page  = $this->mpages->fetch_page($cat, '', $page_name);

        } else if ($category != "" && $sub_category != "") {

            $page = $this->mpages->fetch_page($cat, $subcat, $page_name);
        }

                // $page contains your page data, do with it what you wish.

}
?>

You of course would need to modify your page fetching model function accept 3 parameters and then pass in info depending on what page type you are viewing.

In your application/config/routes.php file simply put what specific URL's you would like to route and at the very bottom put this:

/* Admin routes, login routes etc here first */

$route['(:any)'] = "pages"; // Redirect all requests except for ones defined above to the pages controller.

Let me know if you need any more clarification or downloadable example code.