If you’ve been building advanced collection routes in Statamic and encountered frustrating 404 errors when working with nested entries, you’re not alone. Recently, while working on a photo gallery feature, I ran into an issue where routes like:

kept throwing 404s despite everything appearing configured correctly. Here’s what happened, what I learned, and how you can fix it in your project.

The Problem

I had two collections:

1. Seasons (e.g. Winter 2024, Summer 2025)
2. Galleries (each belonging to a Season)

In the photogallery route, I wanted the URL to show:

For example:

However, visiting these URLs threw a 404 Not Found error, even though both entries existed with correct slugs and the relationship was defined using an entry field on Galleries pointing to its parent Season.

Why This Happens

In Statamic, when using nested route parameters like {season}/{gallery}, Statamic treats them as independent unless:

1. You define route binding logic that tells Statamic how to resolve {gallery} in the context of {season}.
2. You’re using structured collections with nested entries, which auto-resolve slugs hierarchically.

But when dealing with entry-to-entry relationships across two flat collections, the default routing can’t infer the relationship just from route segments.

The Fix

Here’s how I resolved it cleanly:

1. Use Route Bindings in a Controller

Instead of defining routes purely in your collection settings, handle it via a controller to resolve entries manually:

Step 1: Define your route in web.php

Step 2: Create PhotoGalleryController

Step 3: Create your Blade view resources/views/photogallery/show.blade.php

2. Why This Works

1. Explicit resolution: You tell Laravel (and thus Statamic) exactly how to find the Season and Gallery entries.
2. Relationship integrity: Prevents accessing a Gallery under the wrong Season route.
3. Clean URLs: Maintains your SEO-friendly nested structure without creating unnecessary taxonomies or replicating data.

Alternative: Using Structured Collections

If your Galleries are nested inside Seasons structurally (i.e. Season is a parent entry, Galleries are child entries in the collection tree), Statamic can handle this natively via {parent_uri}/{slug} route patterns. However, for cross-collection relationships, controller-based route resolution is more reliable.

Final Thoughts

Statamic’s flexibility is its superpower, but sometimes it requires manual resolution to maintain relational integrity in complex URLs. If you’re facing 404 errors on nested entry-to-entry routes:

✅ Check your collection structures

✅ Confirm your relationship field configuration

✅ Use controller-based route binding when entries span multiple collections

I hope this helps you debug similar routing issues faster and build your next Statamic feature with confidence.

Have you faced similar nested route challenges in Statamic? Let me know your approaches or tag me on LinkedIn – always happy to discuss practical Statamic development solutions.