Hi, everyone.
This is really more of an MVC question than specifically a Yii question, but I’m using Yii, now, and you all seem like pretty smart people for having chosen it, too 
, so I thought I’d ask the group.
I’m working on a site for a shopping center that, like many others, includes features for authenticated users to make changes to the site content. For example, they might want to add a new store (store name, address, phone number, etc) or to update an existing one. Users who are not logged in will be able to browse the list of stores.
That’s pretty common stuff, and I’ve made sites like this before, though not with Yii. Mainly, I’m wondering if anyone would advise using a module - call it “admin” - in which to keep all of the admin stuff while leaving the public side of the site outside of the module. In other words, I would have the standard directory structure for Yii and would include a modules directory. Assuming the model for my stores is called Store, the “models” directory would have Store model, there would be a “store” directory under views, and there would also be a “StoreController” in the controllers dir. This would be for the public side. Users who visited the site would be seeing the view located in the typical places.
Inside “modules”, however, there would be an “admin” directory that would have a similar directory structure, and the filenames would look almost identical. The difference would be that the controllers and views would all be designed exclusively for administering the site’s data. A user who has logged into the admin side of the site would be seeing views for Store, but they would be coming from modules/admin/views, not the regular views directory for the application. Likewise, the StoreController for the admin would be in modules/admin/controllers and written to handle requests to make changes to data.
Has anyone done this before? Does it make sense to separate things like this? I’m not sure how the model would be treated, since it could easily be shared between them. My understanding is that modules expect to have their own models. I don’t see a point in duplicating them, however, and I don’t know what the workaround might be. It seems like a good idea to keep the admin views and controllers away from the public views and controllers, however, as they are almost like two separate sites.
Thanks in advance!
Holly
