Advice on creating codeigniter app to serve custom microsites - php

Question

I'm building a codeigniter application that will serve custom microsites. Essentially each microsite will be a collection of seven different views all loaded by a single controller's methods. To 'Theme' each microsite there will be different folders containing different versions of these view files (and their associated css, js and image files) and the controller will know which folder of views to load based on information stored in the database for each microsite record.
The problem with this approach is when a single microsite needs to have a custom page that is unique from all the other microsites. Since they're all controlled by one controller, we run into the limitation that either all the microsites need to support this page.
To futher explain what I'm referring to imagine these urls:
http://www.fakewebsite.com/index.php/microsite/index/david_site
http://www.fakewebsite.com/index.php/microsite/index/frank_site
In both of these links the controller is 'microsite' and the method is 'index'
'index' knows what template to return based off it's first argument which is either 'david_site' or 'frank_site' in the above example.

Answer 1

I can't say if this is possible with Codeigniter, but I assume so:
So what's now your problem? That you have too much code in the controllers? Move code from the controllers into the models. Then the code is more re-useable and you can have small controllers on each microsite with fat models that are shared anyway.
Sounds not really good so far, right? Still there's one controller per each site. Well, make each microsite's controller extend from a base controller. So all code's still in one place but for some controller methods they can extend that base controller on a per-site basis.
So the front-end controller then will provide the right controller class per site as it does for the themes - if I understood your question right.

Answer 2

Can you have a default "theme" for that controller, which would accommodate most of your microsites, and then if you need to create custom themes on top you can change it?
So like this
http://www.fakewebsite.com/microsite/david_site/ <-- default theme
http://www.fakewebsite.com/microsite/frank_site/ <-- default theme
http://www.fakewebsite.com/microsite/john_site/customtheme/ <-- custom theme

Answer 3

As I understand the question, you're asking how to load a different view file for only specific "microsites", but you're using the same controller and codebase for all of them.
In your views directory, have 1 directory for default themes, and and then for each "microsite" you want to do something custom with, create another directory which will contain the unique files, then when loading files - check if the unique exists first.
Hasty example that assumes default files are in the root of views/:
// I assume we know which site we're loading
$theme = 'david_site';
// Whatever the current view's name should be
$view = 'page3';
// Path to our custom file if it exists
$custom = APPPATH.'views/'.$theme.'/'.$view;
// Does a custom view exist?
if (file_exists($custom))
{
$view_file = $theme.'/'.$view;
}
else
{
// Use the default
$view_file = $view;
}
$this->load->view($view_file);
As far as I know, there's nothing like view_file_exists() in CI, so we're just using plain old file_exists() with the full path.
It would be worth writing a function for this of course, but hopefully this helps. You could even apply it to loading libraries, models, etc. - or even extend the Loader class to do it automatically (probably overkill).
CI2 already has a version of this feature in the ENVIRONMENT constant, although this usage is not its intention - but that is basically what it does.