custom controller name in CakePHP

Question

我正在用cakephp开发应用程序，我必须为网站中的每个用户提供一个用户页面，例如www.example.com/username，每个用户的用户名都会更改，当访问者访问此URL时，他将获得该用户的详细信息使用特定的用户名，但是在cake用户名中，尝试获取具有该名称的控制器，我该怎么做？

Answer 1

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.

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

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 (eg 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.