CakePHP pages without controller in url - php

Question

Is it possible to have pages route without the controller in the URL but still have other controllers work? Example:
Access pages like this: http://domain.com/about/
Instead of like this: http://domain.com/pages/about/
But still have access to http://domain.com/othercontroller/action/
Doing the following works for having the pages without /pages/ in the URL but if I try to access any other controller it doesn't work:
From: Router::connect('/pages/*', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display'));
To: Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'index'));
Is there a way to setup the Router so that it runs controller/action if it exists. If it does not it runs the pages controller/action?

Answer 1

I think the short answer is, no - it's not possible in the manner you're hoping*. Routing isn't really "logic" driven, so unless you can come up with a way to match the things you want in both respects you can't do "if controller exists, then _, else _" kind of thing.
*You could, however add each "page" as a row in your routes file. That would allow "about", "contact" ...etc to be accessed directly, while things that don't exactly match them are handled by the remaining routes.

Answer 2

I know I'm late, but here's my tip for someone looking for this.
In routes.php
foreach(scandir('../View/Pages') as $path){
if(pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION) == "ctp"){
$name = pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_FILENAME);
Router::connect('/'.$name, array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', $name));
}
}
This will create a route for every ctp file in the View/Pages folder.

Answer 3

I actually solved this the opposite way from Dave's answer above, by adding a route for each controller, rather than each page. (I won't be adding new controllers very often, but I will be adding new content on a regular basis.)
// define an array of all controllers that I want to be able to view the index page of
$indexControllers = array('posts','events','users');
//create a route for each controller's index view
foreach ($indexControllers as $controller) {
Router::connect(
'/' . $controller,
array(
'controller' => $controller,
'action' => 'index'
)
);
}
//create a route to remove 'view' from all page URLs
Router::connect(
'/:title',
array(
'controller' => 'contents',
'action' => 'view'
),
array(
'pass' => array('title'),
'title' => '[a-z0-9_\-]*'
)
);