Question

Magento has this very nice MVC system where modules can register their ‘frontname’ and the like.

Unfortunately is has the effect of contaminating your site with many duplicate urls for the same page if you happen to use several stores and make the store code show up in the URI. It will effectively make a module available on every store view ‘root’ and the main magento root as well.

So I want to get rid of those frontnames a module created for me. I am still using objects supplied by the module I just don’t want it to use the controller it supplier as well (I built my own blocks to load relevant data).

So my question is fairly simple, lets say I have something like this in the community code pool module/etc/config.xml:

    <routers>
        <faq>
            <use>standard</use>
            <args>
                <module>Faq</module>
                <frontName>faq</frontName>
            </args>
        </faq>
    </routers>

How do I make an override / setting in my local codepool that basically unsets / disables this frontname so it doesn’t get found when called?

Alternatively is it possible to prevent loading controllers with frontnames on the store view roots when the option to display the code in the URI is enabled?

Answer 1

I’m not sure what your point is here exactly. It sounds like you have SEO concerns (with your mention of dup. urls)

1. You’ve got the choice not to declare a router for your custom module
2. You could just enable canonical URLs and anything worth indexing (categories/products/cms) will have the right URL
3. You could disallow access to those URLs using robots.txt

Failing that, you could take the drastic (and seemingly pointless) approach to unset the registered route. Extending …

Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front

Would allow you to control the protected routes as you see fit.