David Dollar

Static Pages In Rails

In any web application there will be some static content. In the application I'm building for the Rumble, I needed a static landing page, as well as simple FAQ and Contact pages. I wanted simple static files that I could write in Haml (my choice of templating engine for this project).

The controller below allows you to keep static pages in app/views/pages/<page>.html.haml

# app/controllers/pages_controller.rb
class PagesController < ApplicationController

  rescue_from ActionView::MissingTemplate, :with => :invalid_page

  def show
    render params[:id]
  end

  def invalid_page
    redirect_to root_path
  end

end

A custom route allows us to link to static pages using page_url(:welcome).

The :requirements on the route prevent malicious user input.

# config/routes.rb
map.page 'pages/:id',
  :controller   => 'pages',
  :action       => 'show',
  :requirements => { :id => /[a-z]+/ }

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