Question

There will be several high profile links for customers to focus on, for example:

• Contact Us @ domain.com/home/contact
• About the Service @ domain.com/home/service
• Pricing @ domain.com/home/pricing
• How It Works @ domain.com/home/how_it_works

Stuff like that. I would like to hide the home controller from the URL so the customer only sees /contact/, not /home/contact/. Same with /pricing/ not /home/pricing/

I know I can setup a controller or a route for each special page, but they will look the same except for content I want to pull from the database, and I would rather keep my code DRY.

I setup the following routes:

Route::get('/about_us', 'home@about_us');
Route::get('/featured_locations', 'home@featured_locations');

Which work well, but I am afraid of SEO trouble if I have duplicate content on the link with the controller in the URL. ( I don’t plan on using both, but I have been known to do dumber things.)

So then made routes like these:

Route::get('/about_us', 'home@about_us');
Route::get('/home/about_us', function() 
{ 
    return Redirect::to('/about_us', 301);
});

Route::get('/featured_locations', 'home@featured_locations');
Route::get('/home/featured_locations', function() 
{ 
    return Redirect::to('/featured_locations', 301);
});

And now I have a redirect. It feels dumb, but it appears to be working the way I want. If I load the page at my shorter URL, it loads my content. If I try to visit the longer URL I get redirected.

It is only for about 8 or 9 special links, so I can easily manage the routes, but I feel there must be a smart way to do it.

Is this even an PHP problem, or is this an .htaccess / web.config problem?

What hell have I created with this redirection scheme. How do smart people do it? I have been searching for two hours but I cannot find a term to describe what I am doing.

Is there something built into laravel 4 that handles this?

UPDATE:

Here is my attempt to implement one of the answers. This is NOT working and I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

application/routes.php

Route::controller('home');

Route::controller('Home_Controller', '/');

(you can see the edit history if you really want to look at some broken code)

And now domain.com/AboutYou and domain.com/aboutUs are returning 404. But the domain.com/home/AboutYou and domain.com/home/aboutUs are still returning as they should.

FINAL EDIT

I copied an idea from the PongoCMS routes.php (which is based on Laravel 3) and I see they used filters to get any URI segment and try to create a CMS page.

See my answer below using route filters. This new way doesn’t require that I register every special route (good) but does give up redirects to the canonical (bad)

Answer 1

I used routes.php and filters to do it. I copied the idea from the nice looking PongoCMS

https://github.com/redbaron76/PongoCMS-Laravel-cms-bundle/blob/master/routes.php

application/routes.php

// automatically route all the items in the home controller

Route::controller('home');

// this is my last route, so it is a catch all.  filter it

Route::get('(.*)', array('as' => 'layouts.locations', 'before' => 'checkWithHome', function() {}));

Route::filter('checkWithHome', function()
{
    // if the view isn't a route already, then see if it is a view on the 
    // home controller.  If not, then 404
    $response = Controller::call('home@' . URI::segment(1));
    if ( ! $response )
    {
        //didn't find it
        return Response::error('404');
    }
    else
    {
        return $response;
    }

});

They main problem I see is that the filter basically loads all the successful pages twice. I didn’t see a method in the documentation that would detect if a page exists. I could probably write a library to do it.

Of course, with this final version, if I did find something I can just dump it on the page and stop processing the route. This way I only load all the resources once.

applicaiton/controllers/home.php

public function get_aboutUs()
{
        $this->view_data['page_title'] = 'About Us';
        $this->view_data['page_content'] = 'About Us';

        $this->layout->nest('content', 'home.simplepage', $this->view_data);
}

public function get_featured_locations()
{
        $this->view_data['page_title'] = 'Featured Locations';
        $this->view_data['page_content'] = 'Featured properties shown here in a pretty row';

        $this->layout->nest('content', 'home.simplepage', $this->view_data);
}

public function get_AboutYou()
{
    //works when I return a view as use a layout
    return View::make('home.index');
}