How do you serve vanilla/custom pages in an MVC based site?

Question

Let's say you've setup your site using Pylons, Django and most of the site runs fine and according to the framework used. However, what if you had a custom section that was entirely say, composed of flat html files and its own set of images, which you didn't have time to actually incorporate using the framework and were forced to basically support, under the same domain? Should there be some sort of default controller/view that's super bare minimalistic or do frameworks such as these somehow offer support in some smart way?

I realize also that potentially one could setup a new subdomain and reroute it to an entirely different directory, but I'm just curious as to how one would solve this when forced to deal with a framework.

Answer 1

For pylons you should be able to drop your static html files in the public directory. If there isn't a controller for a url then I think pylons looks in the public folder next.

Answer 2

For Django, I would serve these in exactly the same way as you serve your static assets - in your site_media directory, along with subdirs for js, css and img, you could have an html directory. Then the URL would just be /site_media/html/whatever.html.

Answer 3

In Django take a look at flatpages. It's part of the django.contrib package and uses flatpages middleware to serve up flat HTML controlled through the admin interface. For basic purposes, serving up additional about pages or the like this should do the trick.

You could also just create an HTML folder and - using mod_python, at least - set no handler for that path in the Apache configuration file (e.g. vhost.conf).

Answer 4

When serving static pages I'd rather avoid having Django or Pylons handle the request, and handle it with the web server only. Using Nginx, you'd use a directive like:

location / {
   root /whatever/the/path/is/;

   # if the file exists, return it immediately
   if (-f $request_filename) {
      break;
   }

   # pass requests to MVC framework
   # i.e. proxy to another server on localhost:
   proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:80;
}