Question

I am currently developing a blogging system with Ruby on Rails and want the user to define his “permalinks” for static pages or blog posts, meaning:

the user should be able to set the page name, eg. “test-article” (that should be available via /posts/test-article) – how would I realize this in the rails applications and the routing file?

Answer 1

Modifying the to_param method in the Model indeed is required/convenient, like the others said already:

def to_param
  pagename.parameterize
end

But in order to find the posts you also need to change the Controller, since the default Post.find methods searches for ID and not pagename. For the show action you’d need something like this:

def show
  @post = Post.where(:pagename => params[:id]).first
end

Same goes for the other action methods.

You routing rules can stay the same as for regular routes with an ID number.