Your CakePHP application's Homepage
Posted on 12/12/08 by Felix Geisendörfer
Rob Wilkerson and I just talked about what the best place is to put your homepage in CakePHP. My answer was the following:
If your homepage is static, just use your PagesController to render a home.ctp view.
If your homepage is dynamic, add a homepage method to your PagesController:
public function view() {
// Your normal pages
}
public function homepage() {
$posts = ClassRegistry::init('Post')->find('all');
$this->set(compact('posts'));
}
}
Don't forget to update your routes. Some apps may also simply point their home route to the index function of another controller. How do you handle homepages in your app?
-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined
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Rob Wilkerson: You could rename the view, there is really nothing magic to it. Doesn't really matter in the long run either : ).
In most cases I create a dedicated controller: IndexController
The controller contains severeal methods for homepages, i.e. one for unregistered users, one for registered and so on.
to this point, i have only used routing to a function of one of my controllers. eg. for an online training signup app i routed the home page to a controller listing current courses.
Of course it depends on the specifics, but I tend to agree with dave that making a new "/" route to some controller and action is the easiest way to get a dynamic homepage.
p.s. as I've shamelessly exemplified here :)
http://teknoid.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/get-yourself-a-new-home-alternative-to-homectp/
I usually use the same method you described for websites. However I created a dashboards controller, for the last application I've build, to act as the homepage of the application
I usually changing only the routes. Most of the time I am writing a system where some of the index action is enough to be home page of it. For websites - I am using CMS :)
I generally build standard content management systems so I need all pages to be editable for my clients.
I setup the '/' route to point to the view method of the pages controller and pass an argument of 'index'. The view method is setup to expect a slug argument which it then uses to lookup in the database.
$Route->connect('/', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'view', 'index.html'));
//pages_controller.php
function view($slug = null) {
if(!$slug || $this->Page->findCount(array('Page.slug' => $slug)) == 0) {
$this->cakeError('error404', array(array('url' => strtolower('/pages/'.$slug), 'message' => 'Was not found on this server', 'base' => $this->base)));
}
$this->set('page', $this->Page->findBySlug($slug));
}
So, do you mean you placed a modified copy of pages_controller.php from CakePHP in /app/controllers? Trying to do that, I just get a "Missing Database Table" error.. Or am I missing the point here?
Oscar: Put in var $uses = array(); into the copied PagesController.
This is to overwrite cake's convention to seek a Page model (which is non existent in your app).
Ah, of course, thanks, got it working now :)
You'r welcome. ; )
I generally use IndexController for my home page, I think. I'm not that great with PHP or Cake though.
Hi. I also needed data to be pulled on the homepage which is just basically to display summaries of some tables for the quick view of a user.
I have this now
< ?php
class PagesController extends AppController {
var $uses = array();
function home() {
echo 'a';
}
}
?>
But when I try to access the normal "http://[site]/", it asks me for the "display" method and view. And when I add the file and method - it then uses that instead of the home.ctp. why is that? I already have the home function and view. why not that?
I hope i kinda explained it clearly.
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Just thought I'd jump in with a little context...
I was using all of the defaults - routes, home.ctp, etc. - and I realized that I wanted my homepage to pull a little data. This is data I needed for the homepage only, so an element seemed unnecessary. I also didn't want to modify PagesController->display() and I didn't want to have the entire PagesController load the model I needed via $uses because I only needed that model on the homepage.
Felix's solution worked perfectly except for one thing. Because I was using the default home.ctp file, I had to name the new method PagesController->home() (though maybe I could've specified the name of the view template to use in the method itself?).
Thanks again, Felix.