Set a route for all requests within a plugin

Question

I’m trying to use a plugin to set up a site route that will direct every page request to a special template.

This is what I’ve set up in my plugin file.

public function registerSiteRoutes()
    {
        return array(
            '*' => 'special/index',
        );
    }

Using the above doesn’t seem to do anything. If I replace * with a word, then try to visit that URL I get something different but not my template. would love it if someone could put me right here

UPDATE If I change tact a bit and route to a controller using a specific url then I can see it gets there

public function registerSiteRoutes()
    {
        return array(
            'beer' => array('action'=>'beer/index'),
        );
    }

But I can't figure out how to catch all requests using * doesn't appear to do anything

UPDATE @robin helped me out massively here with some more info outside the comments.

Basically in Craft 2 the plugin routes get called first no matter what. So I can hijack the init method to load my special template

UPDATE 2 I made this into a Craft 2 plugin. https://github.com/moresoda/craft-emergency-mode

Craft 3 plugin coming soon.

Answer 1

You can use the catch all route

'catchAll' => ['site/offline'],

For yii1 you can also do

'<url:(.*)>' => 'controller/action'