Elgg offers a facility to manage your plugin pages via a page handler, enabling custom urls like http://yoursite/your_plugin/section
. To add a page handler to a plugin, a handler function needs to be registered in the plugin's start.php
file with elgg_register_page_handler()
:
elgg_register_page_handler('your_plugin', 'your_plugin_page_handler');
The plugin's page handler is passed two parameters:
- an array containing the sections of the URL exploded by '/'. With this information the handler will be able to apply any logic necessary, for example loading the appropriate view and returning its contents.
- the handler, this is the handler that is currently used (in our example
your_plugin
). If you don't register multiple page handlers to the same function you'll never need this.
Pages in plugins should be served only through page handlers, stored in pages/
of your plugin's directory and do not need to include
or require
Elgg's engine/start.php
file. The purpose of these files are to knit together output from different views to form the page that the user sees. The program flow is something like this:
- A user requests
/plugin_name/section/entity
- Elgg checks if
plugin_name
is registered to a page handler and calls that function, passingarray('section', 'entity')
as the first argument - The page handler function determines which page to display, optionally sets some values, and then includes the correct page under
plugin_name/pages/plugin_name/
- The included file combines many separate views, calls formatting functions like
elgg_view_layout()
andelgg_view_page()
, and then echos the final output - The user sees a fully rendered page
There is no syntax enforced on the URLs, but Elgg's coding standards suggests a certain format.