How can I prevent all entries from being listed with an arbitrary url?

Question

This is quite a basic question I think, but when viewing a template with entries with the standard entries tag:

{exp:channel:entries channel="mywebsite"}

and if I replace the last segment with arbitrary letters, it will show all entries from that channel, like:

www.somewebsite.com/mytemplategroup/sdjhkkajsd

In a page with regular entries I can avoid this by using entry_id=segment_2, but this doesn't work when viewing a category with category titles enabled:

http://www.somewebsite.com/mytemplategroup/category_template/category/category_url_title

Replacing category_url_title with "lzdsfuhkhjfdg" shows ALL entries from the channel. I can't prevent this in the entries tag with

 {exp:channel:entries channel="mywebsite" category_url_title="segment_4"}

Because that is not supported. So how would you solve this?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

On a single entry page (ie one with a url_title or entry_id in the URL) you can use the require_entry="yes" parameter, by using this in conjunction with the {if no_results} conditional, to only show a "proper" page when a valid entry is passed.

{exp:channel:entries require_entry="yes"}
  {if no_results}
    {redirect="site/404"}
  {/if}
  <h2>{title}</h2>
  ...
{/exp:channel:entries}

For category pages things are a little more complex as you note. I tend to make use of Low's Seg2Cat extension, which provides additional variables in your template of the format segment_n_category_id, and perhaps most handily {last_segment_category_id} so you can then do:

 {if last_segment_category_id == ''}
   {redirect="site/404"}
 {/if}

You can then just leave your channel:entries tag with the (default) dynamnic="yes" and it will pull the relevant entries for the cat from the URL, but redirect to your 404 if there isn't a valid category in the URL.

All that said, rather than using a separate template for category listings I frequently just use the same template for my "list" view as for my category view, eg I have URLs like example.com/group/template (list) and example.com/group/template/category/category_url_title (category)

I then use Seg2Cat to conditionally output the category name/info in my template if present:

{if last_segment_category_id}
   <h1>{last_segment_category_name} News</h1>
   {last_segment_category_description}
{if:else}
   <h1>Latest News</h1>
{/if}
{exp:channel:entries limit="10" channel="news"}
  ...
  entry content in here
  ...
{/exp:channel:entries}

That way you have one fewer templates to manage, and you don't have to worry so much about having valid categories in your URL

Answer 2

I'm with @Tom Davies on this one. Require entry, but you can also do so by using

url_title="{segment_3}"

But make sure you set-up the 'no_results' option, either to redirect or just a statement on page. But that stops the prevention of random urls. Some bots/spiders do this as well, and you'll see a search engine has tons of erroneous links indexed.

Answer 3

Good answers above, but as an easy first line of defense I also always include a limit in my channel:entries tag--

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="1"}

That way if it does fail it's a bit more graceful.