I've had a bit of an interest for micro frameworks, and for a new project I'm working on I decided on Silex.

I've started hitting some nasty walls though, the routing system seems inconsistent and intuitive. To better explain, some examples.

I have a default route that acts as a fallback. This default route simply includes a static template (if it exists). This route looks something like this:

<?php

$app->get('/{name}', function($name) {
   // If the page exists, render it, otherwise throw 404
});

Simple enough. We also want to match the root of the application (the index, basically). This can be easily done with a default value:

<?php

$app->get('/{name}', function($name) {
   // If the page exists, render it, otherwise throw 404
})->value('name','index');

The first problem arose here. The existing site used urls all ending with a slash (/contact/ for example). But these routes won't match that. These routes will match /contact, but not /contact/. This can be fixed though. If your routes end with a slash, silex will be able to match both:

<?php

$app->get('/{name}/', function($name) {
   // If the page exists, render it, otherwise throw 404
})->value('name','index');

The preceding example will match /contact/. If the user went to /contact instead, it will redirect the user back to /contact/. I would have preferred the opposite in this case, but fair enough. This route will however no longer match the root of the website, so we need to refactor this a bit:

<?php

$staticHandler = function($name) {
  // If the page exists, render it, otherwise throw 404
}

$app->get('/{name}/', $staticHandler);
$app->get('/', function() use ($staticHandler) {
  return $staticHandler('index');
} );

Note that the last example could have been structured a bit nicer, but you get the point.

The first real problem arose when trying to use 'ControllerProviders, or ControllerCollections'. These objects can be responsible for a sub-tree. An example of how we want to use this is have a single class be responsible for a /blog/ section of the site. This would be done with something like:

<?php

$app->mount('/blog/', new MySite\Controller\Blog());