Override the frontname for a existing Magento module

Question

I recently started working on Magento for one of my projects and stuck at something, which i see a very common use case. I tried looking at different blog post but couldn't find any which can hint towards that.

My question is, I want to able to override the existing frontName for a module in magento. e.g.

If current user dashboard URL is

http://example.com/customer/account/

I want to change it to.

http://example.com/user/account/

Also I will probably add more method in my controller to add few other functionalities. For which I found following post very useful.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15212753/getting-2-modules-to-use-same-frontname-in-magento

Can i refer this also any suggestion on how to change frontName?

Answer 1

You will need a custom module that only changes the frontname of a module (Mage_Customer in this case.)

Let's name the module Easylife_UserThis module contains only 2 files.

app/etc/module/Easylife_User.xml - the declaration file

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Easylife_User>
            <codePool>local</codePool>
            <active>true</active>
            <depends>
                <Mage_Customer /><!-- should depend on Mage_Customer so it is loaded after it -->
            </depends>
        </Easylife_User>
    </modules>
</config>

app/code/local/Easylife/User/etc/config.xml - the configuration file

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Easylife_User>
            <version>1.0.0</version>
        </Easylife_User>
    </modules>
    <frontend>
        <secure_url>
            <customer>/user/</customer><!-- might be needed if you have secure urls but not sure -->
        </secure_url>
        <routers>
            <customer><!-- for the customer route... -->
                <args>
                    <frontName>user</frontName><!-- just change the front name -->
                </args>
            </customer>
        </routers>
    </frontend>
</config>

Clear the cache and you are done.

If all your links to the customer pages are generated using ->getUrl('customer/...'). This should work.
If you have links in your templates like this

<a href="/customer/...">Customer</a>

It won't work. But anyway, you shouldn't have links like the example above.