CakePHP - file structure confusion - different controllers, or all in same?

To understand my confusion/question, let me first give a quick overview of the site I'm building: The site has a homepage, and 7 category pages, each with the same/similar layout.

On most category homepages (eg "Dining"), you can do a search (ie a search for restaurants), which will take you to a results page. This will have the same/similar layout as the... "Theaters" search result page...etc etc.

So - although there are a lot of sections, there are not a lot开发者_StackOverflow中文版 of page layouts.

Question: I'm not sure if I should create separate controllers for each, and just use the same CSS for them? Or if I can use the same view file, but populate each content area on the page differently based on the url/action..etc?

They'll all reference different & multiple tables in the database - for instance, restaurants will reference the restaurants table, the cuisines table, the zip_codes table...etc. Theaters might reference the "movies" table, the zip_codes table...etc etc etc

But - I also want an admin tool for some - ie "restaurants/edit" or "theaters/edit" ...etc - not ALL the pages will have admin for that specific url - ie "outdoors" might just be "businesses/edit" or something generic... I don't know - I'm confused as you can tell.

Any help is GREATLY appreciated. I've read a lot about the technical things to do w/ CakePHP, but I can't find any good resources for general project structures for varying scenarios.

You can answer this yourself. Suppose you implement separate controllers, models and views for each, how do they differ? If they only differ in the table names and labels/strings that they use, then you can use just one generic controller. But, if they are different in other ways (e.g. the Restaurants model has a totally different relationship structure than a Movie model) then use separate controllers.

To prevent too many repetition between controllers and view files when you do use separate controllers, try to push functionality in a common base controller (e.g. AppController, of create your own base controller based on AppController that your MoviesController and RestaurantsController and so on will derive from). Push generic view code into elements.

A word about CSS: Of course you can (and should) reuse that. It's mostyly separate from the view. Just use sensible class names and id's in your views and the CSS will be easy to reuse.

If you are still unsure, I'd go with separate controllers. It may be more work but it will be cleaner and easier to debug. Use the above suggestions to avoid repetition.

-group elements that will share among all site in a layout (ie. site css, site common js library) -make a view for each of your category(page) (ie. dining page, theater page, restaurants page) and put there page only stuff (ie. theater js, theater includes) there - in theory, every vew should have a controller and model, so you have to make them separate.

anyway url like "restaurants/edit" or "theaters/edit" actually means model "restaurant", operation "edit" in your controller file.

I suggest you read the blog tutorial from cakephp site, you that should answer all your confusion