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I've started using CodeIgniter and I seem to be doing pretty well. I've hit an issue though.

I have a controller called Articles. Users of the site can do the following:

  • Get an article by slug name
  • Get a list of articles in a category
  • Get a list of articles that have x tag name

My issue is should I create 3 separate controllers:

  • Article.php - For single articles
  • Category.php - For list of articles that have x category
  • Tag.php - For list of articles that have x tags

Or, should I place everything in Article.php?

I'm just trying to figure out the conventional way of doing things.

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  • since all three functions return articles, I would choose to stick with only one Article controller. Commented Dec 28, 2011 at 17:41

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It's up to you (of course), but it sounds like you want one controller, as long as Tags and Categories mean nothing by themselves, without Articles.

For semantics sake, I would rename it to Articles.php with the "s". Then you will have:

/articles/category/{$category_id}

Where "category" is a method of the class/controller Articles. Just remember to change your controller class name as well.

I would probably rename the "tags" method to "tagged", similar to what Stack Overflow does, so the url makes a little more sense:

/articles/tagged/{$tag_slug}

Similar to:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/codeigniter

For individual articles, create a method called "view":

/articles/view/{$article_slug}

If "Tags" or "Categories" were standalone entities or can house more things than just Articles, you might want to make them each their own controller, but in this case I don't think you need to.

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Valid point. If I was to use multiple controllers they would only contain 1 method anyway which would be `{class}/{method}/{slug}'. I just may stick to the one controller for now. So long as it's acceptable to do that. I'm not only learning to use CI but also learn conventional practice when using the MVC pattern. Thanks for your comment.
Just remember there are no rules, only conventions - and those will differ from person to person. Do what works for you and learn from the experience. If you do end up using controllers with only one method each, take a look at the CI _remap() method or use routes.php to route everything through the index() method and keep the urls nice and clean.
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I personally usually use 1 controller generally and put everything in it. Someone people use a controller for every page of their site so that their urls reflect better.

If you use 1 controller for every page you'll have urls like

example.com/blog/article
example.com/blog/about
example.com/blog/contact

while if you use a controller for every page, you can have urls like this

example.com/blog
example.com/about
example.com/contact

obviously in each of those controllers there is an index function.

In your case, I would use 1 controller with different functions that handle the tags/articles/etc.

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It's really up to you how to do it, but I personally would put it in one controller and give it different methods for showing the data. I would also see this as a more conventional way, but it still depends on the project.

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