Customizing the Contentful Slugger

Before we go further into customizing the look and feel of our site, I want to fix the skill URLs so that instead of just /mashing, the page is /skills/mashing. Remember: the fact that our Contentful content instantly has URLs on our site comes from the Contentful package we installed earlier. But that magic has nothing to do with Layouts. So, customizing this URL is also specific to Contentful, not Layouts. But... I really want to fix it.

Creating the Slugger Class

Over in the src/Layouts/ directory, create a new class called ContentfulSlugger. Make this implement EntrySluggerInterface... and then generate the one method we need: getSlug():

We're going to set things up so that this method is called when the dynamic URLs for all Contentful entries are being created. It will allow us to control the "slug", which is really the URL for each item.

To make life easier, use FilterSlugTrait to get access to a method we'll use in a minute:

Ok, on Contentful, we have both Skills and Advertisements. But we don't really want advertisements to have their own page. Unfortunately, with the Contentful integration, there's no way to disable URLs for one specific content type. I'll talk about how to work around that in a minute.

Anyways, this method will be passed both skills and advertisements. Use the new PHP match() function to match $contentfulEntry->getContentType()->getId(). That will return the internal name for each type, which you can find in Contentful. If it's skill, return /skills/ then $this->filtersSlug() - that comes from the trait - passing $contentfulEntry->get('title'):

For advertisement, return /_ad for all of them:

At least, at this point, only one ad could ever have a page on our site: if the user went to /_ad, it would match the first one.

At the bottom, throw a new Exception with "Invalid Type":

So, yes, at this point, advertisements will still have their own page. There's no way to turn that off out-of-the-box. But if you care enough, I would map all advertisements to the same URL or URL pattern like this. Then I would create a route & controller with the same URL and return a 404. That route will take precedence over the dynamic one.

Tagging & Configuring the Slugger

To tell Contentful to use our slugger, we need to, of course, give it tag! Add #[AutoconfigureTag] and this one is called netgen_layouts.contentful.entry_slugger. This also needs a type option... which you can set to any string. Let's use default_slugger:

How is that used? In config/packages/, we need to create a new config file for the layouts contentful package. Let's call it netgen_layouts_contentful.yaml.

Repeat that for the root key. Below, add entry_slug_type, then default set to the type we used in our tag: default_slugger:

This funny syntax says:

For every content type in Contentful, use default_slugger when generating the URL. So, use our ContentfulSlugger.

Ok, done! But... this is not called when we reload the page. Nope. This is called when we "sync" our content from Contentful. Ok, let's re-sync! At your terminal, run:

symfony console contentful:sync

This updates our local database with the latest data from Contentful... and it worked just fine. But when we run:

symfony console contentful:routes

The URLs didn't change! This is a quirk... or maybe a feature so that existing pages don't break. Either way, once a route is imported the first time, it's URL never changes.

The easiest way to reset things is to drop the routes table and reimport everything.

And, this is kind of fun. We can run:

symfony console doctrine:migrations:migrate current-1

That will reverse the most recent migration, causing the contentful and route tables to be dropped. Put them back with:

symfony console doctrine:migrations:migrate

Re-sync the content again:

symfony console contentful:sync

And now check the routes:

symfony console contentful:routes

Yes! The URL is /skills/mashing! So, over on /mashing, we get a good-old fashioned 404. But /skills/mashing works.

Next: we don't yet have a page that lists all of the skills. Let's fix that!