Hide/mask a parent page from front end

[Peter Knight]

Short explanation

Is it possible to hide a page from front-end output but keep the ability display it's children?

Ideally I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve htaccess or nginx

So lets say I have a breadcrumb trail of:

Home > News > Posts > news story 1

and I want to mask off the folder called Posts so it becomes just

Home > News > news story 1

I still want to retrieve the child pages of Posts using selectors etc.

Long explanation

I'll give you a use case...

I start off with a News section and its children are news stories. 

News (name=news, template=news-container)

- news post 1 ( template=news-item)

- news post 2 ( template=news-item)

- news post 3 ( template=news-item)

- news post 4 ( template=news-item)

The structure above lets me use the Add New function because the Parent and Children both have very specific templates and settings.

Client then tells me that there are News child pages which are not news items.

Lets say they want to add pages called Public Relations Contacts, Media Enquiries and Events

They need to be child pages of News but they can't go in the root. They don't need a news-item template and I don't want them to be pulled into any selectors targeting template=news-item or parent=/news/ etc

What I usually end up doing is putting all the news items inside a hidden folder called Posts and redefining the Family settings to retain the Add New functionality

News (name=news, template=news)

 - PR Contacts

 - Media Enquiries

 - Events

 - Posts (name=posts, template=news-container)

 - - news post 1 ( template=news-item)

 - - news post 2 ( template=news-item)

 - - news post 3 ( template=news-item)

 - - news post 4 ( template=news-item)

The problem is that my breadcrumb trail looks like this

Home > News > Posts > news story 1

Although it's logical and structurally sound, there's a duplicate there in terms of content. Both News and Posts pages display a list of News items.

I'm probably not describing this very well but maybe you have the same issue and have a solution?

[LostKobrakai]

If you don't care about the urls showing the name of the wrapping page, than it's not that difficult. 

$page->parents("template!=news-container");

And in the news-container.php:

$session->redirect($page->parent->url);

[Nico Knoll]

For the url you would have to use urlSegements and do a check if a children has the name. Example:

<?php
// in your news template you add the following 
$childPage = $pages->get('/'.$input->urlSegement1.'/');

if(!($childPage instance of NullPage) {
echo $childPage->render();
exit;
}


?>

[LostKobrakai]

Maybe not perfectly related, but it's also using urlSegments to have pages live under a different parent: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/7548-dual-url-structure-for-categorized-content/. It's a little more verbose than Nico's example.

[Peter Knight]

If you don't care about the urls showing the name of the wrapping page, than it's not that difficult. 

$page->parents("template!=news-container");

And in the news-container.php:

$session->redirect($page->parent->url);

Hey. I should have mentioned, it's really any/everywhere that I want to mask the parent page name. Particularly URLs and breadcrumb trails.

Otherwise, thanks for the tips. I'll test during the week.

[Macrura]

probably the best way for what you are asking would be what Ryan did in the CMS Critic Case Study, where you rewrite those URLS for those pages, using a simple hook into the page URL.