Codeigniter multiple controllers vs many methods?

I have a site that has a lot of pages that lye at the root (ex. /contact, /about, /home, /faq, /privacy, /tos, etc.). My question is s开发者_开发问答hould these all be separate controllers or one controller with many methods (ex. contact, about, index within a main.php controller )?

UPDATE: I just realized that methods that are within the default controller don't show in the url without the default controller (ie. main/contact wont automatically route to /contact if main is the default controller ). So you would need to go into routes and override each page.

If all of these are just pages, I would recommend putting them into a single controller. I usually end up putting static pages like this into a 'pages' controller and putting in routes for each static page to bypass the '/pages' in my URLs.

If they are share the same functionality, so they should be in the same controller.
for example, if all of them are using the same model to take content from, so, one controller can easily handle it.
Why in one controller? because you always want to reuse your code.

   class someController{
    function cotact(){
        print $this->getContentFromModel(1);

    }

    function about(){
        print $this->getContentFromModel(2);
    }

    function home(){
        print $this->getContentFromModel(3);
    }

    private function getContentFromModel($id){
        return $this->someContentModel->getContentById($id);
    } 
}

(instead of print, you should use load a view)

See in my example how all of the function are using the same getContentFromModel function to share the same functionality.

but this is one case only, there could be ther cases that my example can be bad for...

in application/config/routes.php

$route['contact'] = "mainController/contact";
$route['about'] = "mainController/about";
$route['home'] = "mainController/home";
$route['faq'] = "mainController/faq";
$route['privacy'] = "mainController/privacy";

and you should add all of these methods within the mainController.php

You can also save the content of the pages in your database, and them query it. For instance, you can send the url as the keyword to identify the page content

   $route['contact'] = "mainController/getContent/contact";
    $route['about'] = "mainController/getContent/about";
    $route['home'] = "mainController/getContent/home";
    $route['faq'] = "mainController/getContent/faq";
    $route['privacy'] = "mainController/getContent/privacy";

in this case you only have to create one method named "getContent" in the controller "mainController" and this method will look something like this:

class mainController extends CI_Controller
{
public function getContent($param)
{
    $query = $this->db->get_where('mytable', array('pageName' => $param));
//  then get the result and print it in  a view
    }    
    }

Hope this works for you

The page names you listed should probably be different methods inside your main controller. When you have other functionality that is related to another specific entity, like user, you can create another controller for the user entity and have different methods to display the user, update the user, register the user. But its all really a tool for you to organize your application in a way that makes sense for your domain and your domain model.

I've written a blog post about organizing CodeIgniter controller methods that might be helpful to you. Check it out here: http://caseyflynn.com/2011/10/26/codeigniter-php-framework-how-to-organize-controllers-to-achieve-dry-principles/