Dynamic urls in laravel?

Question

I am looking at switching to laravel for my next project.

My next project is probably going to be a small site with a few static pages, a blog and a projects manager and will be using controllers not routes.

What I am curious about is how I can manage dynamic routes in Laravel.

Basically, I want to build in an admin section so I can easily create the static pages on the fly, and the static pages will have SEO focussed urls, e.g. http://domain.com/when-it-started I do not want to have to create a new controller or route manually for each page.

So I am wondering what the cleanest way is to handle this.

essentially all static pages are going to share the same view, just a few variables to change.

The dynamic routing should work with the controllers not instead of.

E.g. if we have a controller about with a function staff then this should be loaded via http://domain.com/about/staff

but we dont have the function players, so a call to http://domain.com/about/players should check the database to see if a dynamic route exists and matches. If it does display that, otherwise show the 404 page. Likewise for a non-existant controller. (e.g. there would not be a when-it-started controller!)

The chosen answer doesn't seem to work in Laravel 4. Any help with that?

Answer 1

For Laravel 4 do this

Route::get('{slug}', function($slug) {     $page = Page::where('slug', '=', $slug)->first();      if ( is_null($page) )         // use either one of the two lines below. I prefer the second now         // return Event::first('404');         App::abort(404);      return View::make('pages.show', array('page' => $page)); });  // for controllers and views Route::get('{page}', array('as' => 'pages.show', 'uses' => 'PageController@show'));