custom controller name in CakePHP

Question

I am developing an application in cakephp, I have to provide a user page for each user in the site like www.example.com/username, username will changes for each user, when a visitor comes to this url he gets details of the user with that particular username, but in cake username tries to get the controller with that name, How can I done this ?

Answer 1

It's a nice feature for users to access their accounts in this way and, contrary to other answers, I don't think it's a headache or undesirable in any way.

The best way to achieve this is with routes, but not manually - database driven routes. Mark Story has a great article on the topic and I've used this approach with great ease and success on very large websites:

http://mark-story.com/posts/view/using-custom-route-classes-in-cakephp

The only change I make is that I maintain a table called "routes" and have a corresponding Route model. The routes table simply has id/name/value fields. The name is the nice URL (in your case "somegreatuser"), whilst the value is the system URL (e.g. users/view/123).

All you need to do is maintain a blacklist of reserved usernames which is easily done using validation in the Route model.

Answer 2

You can do it with routes as a fallthrough at the end of the routes file, but it's not advisable - ssokolow has explained why. I have used something very similar for a CMS, but for pages rather than users and uniqueness was maintained by the system.

If it's essential that the URL reads like www.example.com/username rather than www.example.com/users/username then I would look at doing it by apache rewriting the url. This will probably still give you problems if a username coincides with a pagename and may well be confusing for visitors not to mention search engines.

Keep it simple - don't give yourself a headache.

Answer 3

My first response would be to say "don't do that". What happens if you decide to add a promotions page at some point in the future but you've already got a user named "promotions" or you want to add a forum system but you've already got not-very-nice users named "forums" and "boards"?

Better to do something like www.example.com/users/username. (eg. www.example.com/users/ssokolow) That's how all the sane sites do it. In fact, on a related note, Mozilla just redesigned the addon collections system so that collection names are namespaced under the usernames to solve a similar issue.

Anyway, whatever you decide, instructions for customizing your URL mappings independently of your controller designs are in Section 3.4.5: Routes Configuration in the CakePHP 1.3 manual.

You'll want to set up the order of precedence so that CakePHP tries everything else first (like the login page and the submit handlers for forms accepting user data) and then tries your username mappings as the last thing before giving up and returning a 404.

You'll still have to manually maintain a list of usernames that are banned because their profile URLs would be overridden by site-global stuff (eg. login) and you'll still have to watch out for cases which malicious users might be able to exploit to trick other users into something, but it will work.