Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
I had a client who was using the “store code in URL” feature of Magento throughout their site. This was working well for them, but there were a few URLs where they wanted NO store code, and I was asked to look into it.
Digging deep into the URL generation code, I discovered the <direct_front_name> node.
<global>
<request>
<direct_front_name>
<frontnames/>
<here/>
<skip/>
<store-code-in-url/>
</direct_front_name>
</request>
</global>
There was much rejoicing. Putting a front name here ensured links with said front name were generated without a prepended store code.
Then I noticed it didn’t work for about half the links on the site. It turns out the <direct_front_name> feature doesn’t work with URLs generated by store directives in CMS/Static-Block templates
{{store direct_url='always-gets-a-store-code'}}
A bug? A feature? A bug maintained as a feature to ensure backwards compatibility? Two systems developed by engineers who didn’t or couldn’t talk to one another?
In the end we decided on a quick search and replace through the CMS tables and hard-coded URLs.