Question

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.

Answer 1

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.