Page handler¶
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.
Code flow¶
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, passing array('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() and elgg_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.