CakePhp-在不同的URL上拆分视图和控制器

Question

I have 2 sites. www.xxx.com & www.yyy.com

I have a CakePHP solution on www.xxx.com and it works fine.

I want to now make site www.yyy.com use the same controllers and DB as www.xxx.com . BUT it is to have totally different CTPs and CSS. I can of course just copy the whole lot over to www.yyy.com but then I need to maintain 2 sets of code. I only want to maintain 2 different sets of CTPS and CSS.

So the questions are:

1. Can you split controllers and views across 2 different URLs?
2. Assuming the answer to 1 is yes. Can you then have 2 different sites using the same controllers and DB but showing a totally different view & CSS?
3. What should I think about before doing this from your experience?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your question is quite similar to a site that needs a desktop and a mobile version. You could research the solutions used for that.

We built something like this by creating an AppController that sets a variable in the beforeFilter() method (check the request domain in your case), and use this variable in a the render method to choose which layout and view files to use:

function render($action = null, $layout = null, $file = null) {                
    $view_file = false;
    $layout_file = false;

    // test for availability of layout does not work for null so set to default setting of null.
    if ($layout === null) {
        $layout = $this->layout;
    }

    // if not mobile: show desktop version.
    if (!$this->is_mobile) {
        $view_file = file_exists(VIEWS . $this -> name . DS . 'desktop/' . $file . '.ctp');
        $layout_file = file_exists(LAYOUTS . 'desktop/' . $layout . '.ctp');
    }

    return parent::render($action, ($layout_file ? 'desktop/' : '') . $layout, ($view_file ? 'desktop/' : '') . $file);
}

This way if is_mobile was false the views/layouts in a subdir 'desktop' were used instead of the default ones. You can use the same system to create separate views/layouts for 2 domains.

We do this by overriding render() instead of using afterFilter() which is sometimes also suggested. I forgot the real reason but know that it was because we couldn't get it to work like we wanted using afterFilter() ;-)