Runway and .htaccess URL rewriting guidance

Keir Moffatt said:

Howdy,

I have the following URLs as a result of list and detail (with optional category):

LISTINGS
/projects/
/projects/?cat=printdesign

DETAIL
/projects/?s=microsoft
/projects/?cat=printdesign&s=microsoft

My goal is to rewrite as follows:

LISTINGS
/projects/
/projects/printdesign/

DETAIL
/projects/microsoft/
/projects/printdesign/microsoft/

Use Runway Routes

/products/[*:cat]
/products/[*:cat]/[slug]

Thanks @Robert, appreciated - your post and https://docs.grabaperch.com/runway/routing/ helped me along.

I have managed to get the categories working, but not the slug. Also, if I provide just /projects/project-slug/ it, as I feared, assumes project-slug is a category.

I also tried removing the category part of the routing, so just /products/[slug] but no dice either.

Any further thoughts?

Yeah, I suspected such. I may simply use /all/ when no category is present.

That aside, any ideas why I am struggling to get just slug rewriting working?

E.g. /projects/?s=microsoft to /projects/microsoft

My route in page options is projects/[slug] and I am using the following list & detail code:

if (perch_get('s')) { // output project detail

  perch_content_custom('Projects', array(
    'template' => 'project.html',
    'filter' => 'slug',
    'match' => 'eq',
    'value' => perch_get('s'),
    'count' => 1,
  );

} else { // output project listing

  perch_content_custom('Projects', array(
    'template' => 'project_listing.html'
  );

}

It I go to /projects/microsoft, it is outputting the listing page so I suspect the slug part of the URL is not being rewritten to ?s=

Thanks folks

Ding ding ding! Thank you, that worked.

I will now go and play to see how to get categories involved either using /all/ or some internal logic.

Thanks both, very much appreciated - will post my final outcome.

Using Route: projects/[slug:s] ...

get value of ('s')

perch_get('s'); // value of slug

Without the :s (name) you could get the value as...

perch_get(1); // this would give you slug
perch_get(0); // this would give you entire query

Thanks Robert - I will give that a go next.

In the meantime, I did manage to get it working by forcing /all as the default category:

// always make any category slug available to templates (default to all if blank)
$category = (!perch_get('cat')) ? 'all' : perch_get('cat');
PerchSystem::set_var('current_category', $category);

...and...

// if we have a category... extend options to limit results to specified category
if (perch_get('cat') && perch_get('cat') != 'all') {
  $opts['category'] = 'project-types/' . perch_get('cat');
}

Will report back if I succeed with your suggestion.

Dang, really useful to be able to use perch_get([querystring_array]) but would still either need some logic to check different between /projects/category-slug/ and /projects/project-slug/ OR would need me to split the list and detail over two pages, e.g. /projects/ and /projects-detail/

I reckon I'll stick with the all/ solution for now and try this approach next time.

Thank you so much for your help!