OOP + MVC advice on Member Controller

Question

Hi, I am trying to follow good practices as much as possible while I'm learning using OOP in an MVC structure, so i'm turning to you guys for a bit of advice on something which is bothering me a little here.

I am writing a site where I will have a number of different forms for members to fill in (mainly data about themselves), so i've decided to set up a Member controller where all of the forms relating to the member are represented as individual methods. This includes login/logout methods, as well as editing profile data etc. In addition to these methods, i also have a method to generate the member's control panel widget, which is a constant on every page on the site while the member is logged in. The only thing is, all of the other methods in this controller all have the same dependencies and form templates, so it would be great to generate all this in the constructor, but as the control_panel method does not have the same dependencies etc, I cannot use the constructor for this purpose, and instead I have to redeclare the dependencies and same template snippets in each method. This obviously isn't ideal and doesn't follow DRY principle, but I'm wondering what I should do with the control_panel method, as it is related to the member and that's why I put it in that controller in the first place.

Am I just over-complicating things here and does it make sense to just move the control_panel method into a simple helper class?

Here are the basic methods of the controller:

class Member_Controller extends Website_Controller {

    public function __construct() 
    {
        parent::__construct();

        if (request::is_ajax())
        {
            $this->auto_render = FALSE; // disable auto render
        }
    }

    public static function control_panel()
    {
        //load control panel view
        $panel = new View('user/control_panel');

        return $panel;
    }

    public function login()
    {
    }

    public function register()
    {
    }

    public function profile()
    {
    }

    public function household()
    {
    }

    public function edit_profile()
    {

    }

    public function logout()
    {
    }
}

Answer 1

What I would do, is to avoid shoving everything in one controller, and instead separate functionality accordingly - for example, you could have a Registration_Controller to deal only with members' registration, Authentication_Controller, Profile_Controller, and so on, this way is easier to visualize what each part of your application is responsible for, instead of having one single controller with lots of responsibilities, which leads to confusion and other maintainability issues, at least IMHO, it has worked for me.

Going back to your concrete question about the control panel, yes it makes more sense to take it out of the controller, specially if is not an action of it, and as you mentioned you can have a helper class for all the repeatable display logic. If something doesn't make sense within the context of the controller, take it out.

There are some cool frameworks such as Cake and Zend FW, that make life easier at designing/developing MVC application, and that come with a rich set of components that work out-of-the-box.

MVC and Fw's are not mandatory though, it all comes to the scope and your special needs, some times they are of great deal help, most of the times I use them, but sometimes overcomplicate things. Keep it simple ;)

Cheers, M.