Trying to understand appropriate routing in MVC

Question

I am learning MVC, and trying to understand routing.

I understand that if I want to show an individual blog post for site.com/54, my route would be something like

//index.php
$controller = new Controller();
if ( preg_match("#/(0-9.)#", $uri, $matches) ) {
    $controller->showAction($matches[1]);
}

which would lead to my controller

//controllers.php
class Controller
{
    private function showAction($id) {
        $post = getPostById($id);
        $view = new View('views/show.php');
    }
}

And, on the other hand, a sensible thing to do for different static pages is perhaps

//index.php
...
} elseif ($uri == '/about') {
    $controller->aboutAction();
} elseif ($uri == '/contact') {
    $controller->contactAction();
} elseif ($uri == '/') {
    $controller->indexAction();
} else {
    $controller->missingAction();
}

My question is, what about the in-between? For example, apple.com/ipad/overview/ and apple.com/ipad/features/. They are different pages, so it seems like the latter is sensible (i.e. unique controller method for each page). But then, when you're on /overview, you still need to know you're a sub-page of /ipad (so you can highlight the iPad button in the navigation). If you did the first method (regex parsing), you'd know that (i.e. you could use $matches[1] when constructing your navigation). If you use the second method, it seems like in your view you'd have to do something like $current_product = 'ipad' so your nav would know about it. But this could get cumbersome.

What's the appropriate method?

Answer 1

Have you thought about calling the overview only when the URI ends in "overview" and preceded by a product slug?

$controller = new Controller();
if ( preg_match("#^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/overview/?$#", $uri, $matches) ) {
    $controller->showOverview($matches[1]);
}

This way, you define your routes with the following assumption:

/:product
/:product/specs
/:product/comments
/about

You should check out the Slim Framework: http://www.slimframework.com/

I've used it just for routing when performance was a crucial requirement.