Question

I am a bit confused on how to develop my application:

I was thinking about keeping all Admin -> controllers and Admin -> view separate in sub folders but what would you do with the general assets -> css js img etc.

Answer 1

We asked our selves the same question, at our agency, the first time we decided to throw in an administration interface for our CI based apps.
In most cases, the backend is something, that is meant to be reusable, and have nothing to do with frontend, specially if there is several ones, or there is multiple themes in the frontend. So for that reason, we decided to separate the two.

So our structure is somthing like this :

.../application
.../system
.../theme
          /frontend
              /css
                 /images
              /js
          /ci-admin 
              /css
                 /images
              /js

The ci-admin folder is used across the application, to point files that are used for the backend.
We managed, to write down some helpers, and we inherit all admin controllers from a custom class, that redefines / overrides loading functions, to make it simple to point to the right folders, when we’re requesting admin actions. We use also helpers, for getting the right urls, for templates and minifications purpose etc …

Hope it helps.