Creating a custom category and pages

[roroPrestashop]

Hi Everyone! 

 

I have my own custom CMS that is being used to manage certain pages that Prestashop doesn't have built-in, as well as not having any modules out there, but I'd like to have these pages and categories appear in the Prestashop site.

I have already succeeded in created a custom pages, with their own controllers to show these PHP based pages. 

But what if I need a full category with sub-pages? 

 

Example:

The website will have a "press items" section. This section will have a grid of thumbnails of magazine covers. When an item is clicked you can go into this magazine to "read more".

The url structure should be like this:

http:/site.com/press   => the main grid of articles   (I have managed to do this part, but it's still considered a page and not a category)

http:/site.com/press/article   => the page that will hold the article content itself

(so basically, all of the "article pages" are dynamic)

 

* All of this content will be in a separate table in the database and be accessed from these pages. 

 

Is this possible?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited April 22, 2016 by roroPrestashop (see edit history)

[roroPrestashop]

Any ideas anyone? 

Thanks

[roroPrestashop]

For those who might be interested, I think I may have solved it. It might be a little sloppy, but it seems to work. 

 

By using the same idea as the “patch for module friendly urls” on line 782 of the Dispatcher class, I created an override of the method (“getController”) which looks at the URI (which is "press/press-item"), and checks if the first part of it is also a filename of a PHP file in the root folder (ie press.php) - which is part of my custom PHP page.

 

If the file does exist then apparently it is a custom subdirectory and since there is another part to the URI (the second part), (ie “..../press-item”) then “press” is a category and “press-item” is in that category. So it will load my custom controller and I save the second part as a GET var to be read from within the controller. 

 

This is what I added after the "if" statement in Dispather.php:

if (preg_match('#([a-z0-9_]+)/([a-z0-9_]+)$#i', $uri, $m)) {
   if(is_file(_PS_ROOT_DIR_.'/'.$m[1].".php")) {
      $controller = $m[1];
      $_GET['item'] = $m[2];
   }            
}

If anyone understands this and maybe has another suggestion, I'll be happy to hear!