---
title: Static pages for the enterprise
teaser:
tags: news,web,rails,open source
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2008-04-02
---

[![''][herman]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaBgd_nOXKM)

[herman]: http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2008-4-2-peewee2.jpg "Paging Mr. Herman"

HasManyThroughJoshSusser writes about [how to handle simple static
pages](http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/4/2/simple-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...

```ruby
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](http://comatose.rubyforge.org/) - with mixed results.

What does everyone else do?

Visit our [Open Source page](https://thoughtbot.com/open-source) to learn more about our team's contributions.