Static pages for the enterprise

HasManyThroughJoshSusser writes about how to handle simple static pages.

This is a fairly simple problem that many sites face. You want to keep use of your layout (and any conditionals in it - like a login/logout area, for example), but it feels like overkill to build a bunch of empty actions just to render static content. Not to mention that it’s a disgusting violation of RESTful action naming (which, personally speaking, would keep me up at night).

In Josh’s example, he already has a home_controller with an index action for his homepage - and he takes advantage of that existing controller by adding a #show action to it, and adding a route which will send his static content page requests to that action:

map.home ':page', :controller => 'home', :action => 'show', :page => /about|contact/

This works well, but I don’t really like the overloading of the home_controller #show action there. You’re not showing a home … unless it’s a real estate app and all your static pages are actually For Sale listings … !!!

Here’s an enterprisey static page solution I recently used.

In your routes…

map.site 'site/:name', :controller => 'page', :action => 'show'

And in PageController…

class PageController < ApplicationController

  verify :params => :name, :only => :show, :redirect_to => :root_url
  before_filter :ensure_valid, :only => :show

  def show
    render :template => "pages/#{current_page}"
  end

  protected

  def current_page
    params[:name].to_s.downcase
  end

  def ensure_valid
    unless %w(about copyright guidelines help privacy terms).include? current_page
      render :nothing => true, :status => 404 and return false
    end
  end

end

In this approach, I do a few things to help myself sleep at night:

• I’m staying RESTful with action naming - that’s maybe one hour each night
• I’m keeping the logic about what’s a valid page or not in the controller (which is the next best spot to the filesystem) - although I like Josh’s suggestion to use a PAGES constant in the controller as well.
• I’m avoiding the implicit action behavior that rails gives you when you have files on disk which match requested paths. I’ve never liked this, so I don’t want to reward bad behavior by taking advantage of it.

We’ve also done the create an empty SiteController and throw static content in app/views/site/* approach - and we’ve also tried using Comatose - with mixed results.

What does everyone else do?

Visit our Open Source page to learn more about our team’s contributions.