Rails: aggregate multiple models into single view (think dashboard)

I have a Rails 3.1 "blog" type app and my Post#index has become a sort of overview (or dashboard or sorts) into the whole system. The main content is pulled from the Post model but a sidebar contains info from an Event model, there are other snippets from a News mode开发者_如何学JAVAl, etc…

Post#index is a busy action that has to populate many instance variable before /view/posts/index.html.haml gets a call to render and then the many layouts and partials go to work.

Being as some of these other areas are self-contained, so to speak, I'm wondering if there's a better "Rails way" to approach this? Perhaps I should be looking at encapsulating the Event sidebar (which is effectively Event#index) into some kind of entity that can be re-used perhaps in other views? And, if so, how?

What are the options?

You might checkout

http://cells.rubyforge.org/

I would look into widgetizing it. A framework that I looked into in the past was: http://apotomo.de/ This provides a nice clean way to widget"ize" as well as callback functionality (Ajax) for specific widgets.