I need to create a website like this:
- Home page with public access for everyone.
- This Home page contains a login/register section and links to several mini-sites (the amount will start small but will grow over time)
- The minisites will have same header (logo/menu) and footer (contact, privacy policy) as the home page. What will change is the main content
- To access any of those mini-sites, user bust be logged in
Doesn’t sound very complex right? This is the way I’m thinking now (which obviously I’m not sure it’s the best way, that’s why I’m asking for advice):
- One CakePHP app with a global autentication system (using Auth)
- Each mini site would be just a different page of the site, with its own controller and views (and model if necessary).
- So there would be http://www.mysite.com/mini-site1, http://www.mysite.com/mini-site2, etc
My main concerns about this system are 2:
- What if the number of mini-sites grows a lot? There would be a lot of controllers, view folders, models and who knows if layouts, elements, etc… Maybe not the best organization
- What if mini-sites get more complex? More tables, controllers, scripts, css…
Maybe I’m worrying too much and my concerns are not such an issue, but I would like to know if anyone has any advice for an alternative configuration. For example, having one main page (cakephp app), which would be the home page, and each mini-site being a sub-app (also in cakephp), whose access would be controlled by the main app. This way it would be much more organized, with each mini-site in a different folder with its own controllers, views, models or whatever it needs, and being as complex as it required. I don’t even know if this is possible, or how the server and folders configuration would look be. I have some experience with CakePHP, but not that much.
Any ideas/advice would be much appreciated!
If you are truly building multiple apps then cake has a built in “plugins” architecture that allows you to build stand alone apps inside of a plugin structure that sits a top a main application layer.
We have one we developed here at work that has a main application level that manages all user data, authentication, ACL and has some utility functions that go across all apps, including notifications.
We then have plugins as cake calls them such as Ticketing, a File share and CMS. Each of these look like Cake apps with their own views, controllers and models and sit in a directory under the apps => plugins directory.
It works well, but takes considerable planning to make sure you dont create unnecessary apps or a birds nest of stranded code.
More on plugins here:
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins