Best ways to do stuff (several questions)

[eluser]pistolPete[/eluser]
In my CI application, I have a similar setup:
Some controllers serve special needs (e.g. a gallery, calendar, etc.), the rest is just "plain html" which is stored in the database.

For the html content, I use a single controller, called pages, which retrieves the data from the database.
I set up the following routes:

Code:

$route['default_controller'] = "pages";

// now add a route for the other controllers, e.g. :
$route["gallery(.*)"] = "gallery$1";
$route["calendar(.*)"] = "calendar$1";

// every request which ist not caught by the rules above, is routed to the pages controller
$route[':any'] = "pages";