CMS page URL pattern prioritisation or overriding for certain URLs

Need Help
#1

Hi, I have 2 CMS pages using the following url syntax:

  1. /ideas/:slug?
  2. /:fullslug?*

Some pages are gradually being moved from using CMS page 1 to CMS page 2 so I need to keep both for now, especially as both of them use different layouts. Unfortunately I can’t figure out how to force CMS page 2 to be used when the url is something like ideas/some-post. It potentially matches both but the first CMS page takes priority and I get a 404 because it’s not the correct page for that url.

Therefore I could do with a way of redirecting to, or forcing usage of, the second CMS page for certain urls instead of the first. Is there anything I can use to do this?

I have tried determining the correct page to use in the PHP code of CMS page 1, which is fine, but if I try to return something like Cms::redirect() to redirect to the other CMS page I just get a redirect loop because it still ultimately just redirects back to the same CMS page again due to the higher priority (I’m guessing).

I hope that makes sense. Apologies if I’m missing something obvious.

#2

I think I’ve been able to solve this by hooking into the beforeDisplay event as documented here - beforeDisplay - October CMS

I can do whatever checks I need to determine if a different CMS page should be used and then return the desired CMS page as necessary.

The fullslug parameter required by the eventual CMS page wasn’t immediately available so I had to add it by setting it to the router parameters via the controller provided by the event. No big deal.

#3

You should think about introducing an URI or slug prefix to make the sites distinguishable. It’s just not a good idea to occupy the whole URI namespace and have to workaround that fact with coding. That will haunt you at some point in the future.