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Semi-Static Pages (revised)

#117 Semi-Static Pages (revised)

Sep 02, 2012 | 8 minutes | Routing
There are many ways to handle static pages in a Rails application. Here I show two approaches including one that uses a RESTful style PagesController to keep the content in the database
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Pedro Nascimento about 12 years ago

We have created a gem that handles things on the database and is supposed to be used with things like activeadmin, or typus:
https://github.com/helabs/static_content

It is fairly easy to implement, and works just fine. Give it a try.

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bertomartin about 12 years ago

Nice. I recently did something like this, but I used the friendly_id gem instead for the friendly url stuff. Nice info nonetheless.

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JamesKarrote about 12 years ago

+1

I usually use friendly_id gem too.

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Kevin Mullaney about 12 years ago

You have the following comment in the routes:

if you want the update/destroy actions to work you may want to use a different name for this route.

Indeed the update and destroy actions don't work on those pages. What is the solution?

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Zac Clancy about 12 years ago

To remedy this issue, I added two more routes, just after the one added in the tutorial to handle the 'PUT' and 'DELETE' options for update and destroy. I've only played around with it for a little while, but I haven't seen any issues. This is how my routes for the pages look:

ruby 
root to: "pages#index"
get ':id', to: 'pages#show', as: :page
put ':id', to: 'pages#update', as: :page
delete ':id', to: 'pages#destroy', as: :page

EDIT: Just for further clarification, the paths to edit, would be http://<yourapp>/pages/<page>/edit, rather than http://<yourapp>/<page>/edit. I haven't worked around that yet, but haven't really tried either.

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ricfr about 12 years ago

Thanks for clarifying! Works as you said.

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omcnet about 12 years ago

The choice of whether using a cms/dynamic approach or a static
implementation is more a question of how often the content is supposed to change and how the process of this change is implemented, rather than how many static files the project contains.
One should not forget the massive performance difference between
these two approaches.

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Steve Grossi about 12 years ago

Any thoughts on nesting pages like this? Specifically, say I want an About page at "/about" and a Jobs page at "/about/jobs". I've tried setting the permalink for the jobs page to be "about/jobs", but Rails doesn't recognize this route.

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Steve Grossi about 12 years ago

I found a solution on StackOverflow. By appending constraints: { id: /.*/ } to the get route, so it reads:

ruby 
get ':id', to: 'pages#show', as: :page, constraints: { id: /.*/ }

it now recognizes routes to pages with slashes in their permalinks like "about/jobs". I guess Rails has its own constraints (like no slashes) on id's that this overrides.

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brent about 12 years ago

nice, that works well.

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AmateurGolfer over 11 years ago

I think the order of the routes is important to make this work properly.

resources :products

get ':id', to: 'pages#show', as: :page
resources :pages, except: :show
root to: 'products#index'

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Art Mills over 11 years ago

Not sure if I did something wrong or if Rails 4 changed, but I ran through this episode using Rails 4 beta. The link in the view to point to page_path("about") worked fine if I wanted http://site/pages/about as my link but did not change to just http://site/about even after changing the route.

I wound up making that page_path["about"] and it seemed to work correctly. Just dropping this here if anyone else encounters it.

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Art Mills over 11 years ago

I was incorrect :). page_path("about") always points me to /pages/about and page_path["about"] only works if I'm on the /about page manually, then it shows correctly. Otherwise it doesn't show the path. Shows the root path for some reason. Having fun looking at it though to figure it out.

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jwmii2 over 11 years ago

Processing by PagesController#show as
Parameters: {"id"=>"favicon"}
Page Load (0.2ms) SELECT "pages".* FROM "pages" WHERE "pages"."permalink" = 'favicon' LIMIT 1

Can someone tell me why the get ':id', to: 'pages#show', as: :page route in my route.rb file is passing favicon as an id parameter?