This document assumes you’ve installed hiraeth/bootstrap or a combination of hiraeth/diactoros, hiraeth/middleland, and hiraeth/twig. If you haven’t your mileage may vary. See the installation docs for more information.
Hiraeth provides two primary ways to add a page to your website or web applicaton.
Static Templates
To create a page using static templates you don’t need to do much more than add an .html file to resources/pages. For example, if you don’t already have a homepage, simply create a file at resources/pages/@index.html and paste in the following:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My New Website</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Now reload http://localhost:8080/ to see the result.
If you’re having trouble seeing the page, it may be that you forgot to add the @ symbol at the beginning of it. Hiraeth uses this character at the beginning of a file name to know when its safe to render it directly without a corresponding action.
Although Hiraeth calls these direct to file pages “static templates”, this along with any other .html file you add to resources/pages have the full power of Twig behind them. So feel free to create parent templates and extend them, include partials, etc. See the templating documentation for more details.
Path Resolution
Additional static templates can be added to resources/pages in the same manner as the @index.html page above. It is important to note, however, that when your URL ends in a / Hiraeth will begin looking for another @index.html in the corresponding directory. So for example, if you visit http://localhost:8080/example/, Hiraeth will initially look for resources/pages/example/@index.html.
If the URL’s corresponding static template cannot be found it will look for the alternative path. For URLs that end in a slash, this means it will look in the parent directory for a file with the same name as the last segment of the path, e.g. resources/pages/@example.html in the example above. If the page does not end in a slash, it will attempt to see if there is a directory by the same name and an @index.html file within.
In the event an alternate static template path is found, an HTTP 301 status code will be returned with the more direct URL location for the path.
Actions
Actions always supersede static templates. Although it is possible for static templates to serve as fallbacks, in the event the action returns an HTTP 404 response, we generally suggest not mixing the two for a single URL path in order to avoid confusion.
Actions are PHP classes which are invoked when a URL mapped explicitly to them via a route is requested by a web client. You may already be familiar with the concept, but only know them as “Controllers.” While Hiraeth supports more traditional controller paradigms, it strongly encourages the use of “single action controllers” or simply “actions” to reduce the complexity that may occur in monolithic controller classes.