I've just started to get into MVC with PHP and have had a good mess about with the likes of CodeIgniter and CakePHP. I'm interested to find out what people's approaches to the following would be:
Normally when I have built a website with a CMS in the past I have approached it by having a core URI table in my database. Each URI is unique and represents a page on my website (e.g. www.example.com/about would reference a record in my URI table with 'about' as the unique URI). The URI table also contains a 'type' column which tells the system what type of page it is (e.g. splash, basic, gallery or whatever). Each 'type' has a corresponding table in my database with all the data for records of that type in them (e.g. I would have tables: basic, gallery and splash). The type also tells the system which template/pagehandler to load which in turn does what it needs to do for each page type.
So if you go to www.example.com/about, my system looks in my URI table for a record with URI 'about', finds it's type to be 'basic' so it loads the basic template/pagehandler which uses the basic table in my database to load and render the page. In the CMS I follow a similar approach, I'll have add/edit forms for all of the different types in my page manager.
I was wondering how you would approach this using an MVC framework such as CodeIgniter? I essentially want to have different controllers for each type of page on both the front and back. However, when someone get's to my site, they will end up on a URI with a single level so I need to check the type of the page and pass off to the correct controller. Is there a way you would recommend of checking the type of each page and then loading the relevant controller to do the rest of the work?