This guide assumes that you are familiar with widgets. Customizing error pages will not be a pressing problem until you've developed a working application with Scrivito.
This guide assumes that you are familiar with widgets. Customizing error pages will not be a pressing problem until you've developed a working application with Scrivito.
Every Ruby on Rails application includes customizable static error pages. When the app serves CMS content that can be edited in place, static error pages may suddenly seem like a relic. As a developer, you may wonder:
We will tackle all these questions in this guide.
Let's start by making the content of error pages editable. We will first create a new type of CMS object, “ErrorPage”:
Open the generated model file and define or redefine the attributes of the “ErrorPage” class:
For the sake of simplicity, the errors will only have the title and body attributes. Feel free to add further attributes as you see fit.
Next, provide the “Homepage” class with an attribute for storing the actual error page (which doesn't exist yet). This makes it easier later on to access the error page.
Now, on the Rails console, let's create the error page and store it in the reference attribute of the actual homepage:
Editors will be able to add additional error pages to the website. To prevent this, disable the object class after creating the actual page by calling the hide_from_editor method in the model class.
Since the error page now is a regular CMS object, and we've anchored it in the homepage object, you can now access it like this:
When you start your application and visit localhost:3000/a46745... (using the ID you found above), you can marvel at your new “Page not found” page. Go ahead and edit the title or add widgets!
So, now you created a new page and are able to edit its content, but your application still serves the default error message Could not find Obj with permalink 'missing' if you visit localhost:3000/missing.
Thus, our last step is to connect the dots by rescuing the error and serving the new error page in case of a 404:
Whenever your application now gets a request for a missing page, your editable error_not_found_page is shown (except in RAILS_ENV=development). You can even edit this page in place using any URL that responds with HTTP 404 “Not Found”, provided you have editing enabled.
To use error pages that are localized for different country sites, you'll probably have individual homepages for each country.
In this case, you can add several error page objects and reference a dedicated error page on the error_not_found_page of every homepage. You then need to modify the not_found method so it assigns the corresponding @obj.
A navigation in Scrivito is usually built by traversing a content tree, starting at the parent (e.g. the homepage).
By definition, pages without a parent cannot be part of a navigation. There is no validation for the path attribute, so you can easily create a page that has no parent. Have you noticed above how we used #{homepage.path}/_global/error-not-found as the path? As long as no object with the path #{homepage.path}/_global is created, the error page will not be included in any navigation.