Add block to all CMS Pages with certain URL Key

Question

I'm trying to discover whether this is possible or not. We have a series of CMS pages that represent our library.

So the URL keys for these pages are something like:

• library/
• library/top-ten
• library/five-questions
• library/faq
• etc...

The powers that be want to add a static block that will appear only on library CMS pages. Is there a way, in a layout XML file, to target all the pages that contain a keyword, so I could do something along the lines of

<default>
    ....
</default>
<library_*>
    <reference name="right">
        <block goes here/>
    </reference>
</library_*>

Answer 1

You may find this question useful to understand CMS page layouts. So while you can’t accomplish what you are trying to do in the way you are going about it exactly, here are a couple of options to consider:

Add your layout XML to each of the CMS pages in Admin

This is probably my preferred solution since it leverages out of the box functionality, requiring less maintenance and no coding knowledge to modify.

When editing your CMS page, go to the Design tab:

Here you can change to another page template. You could select a custom page template—that you create with your static block inserted in the right column—under Layout, or add your custom layout XML directly into the textfield:

Admittedly, this would violate the DRY principle since you would do this on each relevant CMS page, but it’s not too much of a violation and it uses Magento’s intended features.

Create a custom layout handle

Similar to the example in the question I linked earlier, you would create a simple extension that adds new layout handles to the relevant CMS pages. The observer would probably look something like this:

class My_LayoutHandle_Model_Observer
{
    public function addLibraryCmsHandle(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
    {
        if ($observer->getAction()->getFullActionName() == 'cms_page_view') {
            $page = Mage::getSingleton('cms/page');
            if (substr($page->getIdentifier(), 0, 7) == 'library') {
                /** @var $layout Mage_Core_Model_Layout */
                $layout = $observer->getLayout();
                $layout->getUpdate()->addHandle('CUSTOM_HANDLE_LIBRARY_PAGE');
            }
        }
    }
}

Then you could target your new handle like this:

<CUSTOM_HANDLE_LIBRARY_PAGE>
    <reference name="right">
        <block goes here/>
    </reference>
</CUSTOM_HANDLE_LIBRARY_PAGE>