ella/ella — Issue #59: Provide a way for better URLs for static pages (static articles)
Author: xaralis
Created: 2012-01-31 08:25:21+00:00
State: open
Labels: proposal

Very often we struggle with "nice URLs" that categories are blocking. This is mostly the case for static pages like contact page, usage conditions and so on.

In some other CMS product, we have seen nice solution which allowed to select different behaviours for different categories. Most interesting are: **article listing** and **showing detail of specified article**. A feature like this would solve our URL issue.

So far, there are several ways how to handle such pages in Ella, but none of them is pleasant.

1) Someone will probably argue that such a function is already available using static articles (or static placements before cleanup started). This is true but static articles' URL just sucks. We don't like having ``/static/`` prefix in URL just because the CMS doesn't know how to do it properly.

2) Using category description to contain HTML to render the page. This smells on the first sight.

3) Put all the HTML in category template. This isn't nice too because you cannot alter the HTML from administration, nor you can change the behaviour of this given category if requested without help of developer.

As you can see, nice solution is missing. This kind of behavior doesn't necessarily need to be in Ella's core, but I would really appreciate if we can find out some nice way how to do this (an app which uses category metadata JSONField and overrides urls file and category detail?).