在zend框架中构建动态菜单时的页面和路线最佳实践映射

Question

while i'm well awared this topic might have come a number of time, i still think that the perspective from which i'm looking at it is different.

I have a ZF 1.10.8 project whith essentially ContentController to manage what i call static pages (not so static anyway) like about us , contact us , products and NewsController for articles, tutorials, all writeups.

i've found that having a dynamic menu will solve a lot of complains from the client and gives more freedom changing the content of the site.

currently i only a main menu bar which is a partial (under layouts/scripts/partials/_mainmenu.phtml folder) which i call in every layout that exists in the system.

Now if i go dynamic, and a new link is created let's say category , how to map the category page to a route (routes are in /application/configs/routes.ini) since the url would be the value of the link in the menu table in the database?

the first thought is to change everything to resource handled by the NewsController to even about us will be an article in that case.Since those that i referenced as static pages require different view i wouldn't know how to handle them.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with my way of thinking it.

Can anyone point me to the right direction please? How would you do if? how joomla guys do it?

thanks for reading.....

Answer 1

i am using named routes to build links in menu

new Zend_Navigation_Page_Mvc(array(
    'label'      => $category->getTitle(),
    'route'      => 'catalog-category',
    'params'     => array('id' => $category->getId()),
));

exact module/controller/action mapping handled by routes module specific routes defined in module bootstrap.

i cant give you more on this as my current routes implementation are too tricky and fragile. must heavily refactor it first.

Answer 2

My approach is to have a plugin that in routeStartup() checks for the existence of the current URI in a database, if the URI is found then the correct route is added using this function:

protected function _createRoute($route, $name, $action = "index", $controller = "index", $module = "default", $params)
{
    $router = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter();

    $defaults = array('controller' => $controller,
                      'action' => $action,
                      "module" => $module);

    $route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route($route, array_merge($defaults, $params));

            $router->addRoute("region", $route);    
}

I don't have a limitless number of controllers and modules so the parameters for this function are hard coded into the plugin, but they could easily for stored against the row in the DB to be more dynamic.

Adding the plugin do this means that after routeStartup() is complete the new correct route is available for the dispatch operation.