Approach for structuring pages needed

[chrizz]

Hello everyone,

following setup I have in my old MODx backend:

• Folder1
  • Page1 
  • Page2
  • Page3 
• Folder2
  • Page1
  • Page2
  • Page3
• Folder3
  • Page1
  • Page2
  • Page3

Folder1 is the defined home page which is reachable under www.domain.com/

Page1 to 3 in Folder1 have a URL like this
www.domain.com/folder1/page1 

www.domain.com/folder1/page2

www.domain.com/folder1/page3

The other folders & pages are reachable like this

www.domain.com/folder2/page1

In PW folder2 and 3 will be children of "home" instead of being neighbors like in MODx.

To keep my URL structure I'd like to know what the best approach will be... unfortunately at the moment I have no clue... :/

thanks a lot!

[Jan Romero]

So with your current structure, Folder1 appears under two separate urls. Once under root, and once under /folder1/. To do this in ProcessWire, you can keep the page structure the same way you have shown, with Folder1, Folder2 and Folder3 as children of the frontpage. They are still “neighbors”, or siblings as PW calls them (you can get a page’s siblings by calling $page->siblings()).

Since you don’t want to have a dedicated frontpage, you would create a special template for the frontpage and either redirect it to /folder1/, or render Folder1 right there:

<?php
    echo $page->child->render();
    //child gets the first child.
    //this is the entire template.

The redirect would work like so:

<?php
    $session->redirect($page->child);
    //if you put any code here, it will
    //not be executed.

The first option would be more like what you have now, where the frontpage simply mirrors its first child. You can use the same template for other “category” pages, where you don’t need an overview page, but want to go directly to the first item.

For completeness’ sake, this would be the full page tree (just add Home at the top):

• Home
  • Folder1
    • Page1 
    • Page2
    • Page3 
  • Folder2
    • Page1
    • Page2
    • Page3
  • Folder3
    • Page1
    • Page2
    • Page3

When you think about it, ProcessWire’s approach makes the most sense anyway. Url paths describe a tree, so it’s only natural that there must be a root page.