chunk into snippet only if spec. page alias or id?

Quote from: ad2003 at Apr 03, 2013, 06:31 AM

$alias = $modx->resource->get('alias');
if ($alias == 'contact' || $alias == 'contact'){
return $modx->getChunk('demo');
}
return '';

Note the change to the last line. Without that you may get the number 1 mysteriously showing up on your pages.

I think the original sample code that was copied had

to cover cases where the default suffix is blank, and for various reasons the suffix .html is hard-coded into the alias.

The || in PHP means "or", so if you only want to check for one alias value, just eliminate that part of the code.

Note the double ==

A common newbie PHP programming error is to use one = which is the assignment operator "make $thisvariable contain thisvalue.". The == is the comparison operator "does $thisvariable contain thisvalue?", and === is an exact comparison operator "is $thisvariable the exact same thing as thisvalue?", which is subtly different than == especially when checking for true/false values.

Well then, the addition of the .html makes sense. So, since MODX producing aliases with the full file designation (in some instances), is just the alias that is generated (or placed) in the alias field good enough for a snippet in MODX?

If you are using it to identify a resource, perhaps. There are cases where aliases are duplicated, in which case it may or may not be significant. Personally, when a specific resource needs to be identified, I use the resource ID.

The "alias" field is what you edit for a resource. When using it to generate a URL, MODx will append the appropriate suffix as specified in System -> Content Types. For example, if a resource has the type HTML (the default) then MODx will add .html to the alias. If it's of the type CSS then MODx will add .css to the alias.

Likewise when the server invokes MODx with the rewritten URL of index.php?q=alias.suffix, MODx will parse the URL to get the alias.html part, and will check for what resource has that alias. MODx doesn't have to hit the database for this, since it keeps a map of alias->ID cached somewhere, and (I think) this array is automatically loaded on every page request.

so essentially, within MODX... all that is needed is the alias?

Yes. Just keep in mind that it may not be a 100% reliable identifier of any single resource. Only the resource ID will do that.