Using CI on the front end and CMS

[eluser]cityzen[/eluser]
I've finally tackled some of my main concerns with CI, so now i'm on to "bigger and better things". In the past I've always coded from scratch for the most part, but what confuses me about the MVC structure is how to use it to do the front end and CMS? if I want my admin to be in a location like www.mysite.com/admin, do I just restrict access to that area (is that something CI does as a primary function?). Or is that mixing apples and oranges too much? I would hope it wouldn't require two installs of CI... Is that "best practices", if not, in the MVC world, what is the common/best practice for developing a front end and admin in a framework?

I did search and found a few discussions regarding using other CMS modules with CI, but nothing exactly what I'm looking for.

- also, where do you typically install CI? Do you usually put it in your root or into a sub folder like /CI

Thanks in advance!

Mike

[eluser]Majd Taby[/eluser]
Take a look at CodeExtinguisher (link in my signature)

[eluser]cityzen[/eluser]
Hi jTaby-

Thanks for the response. I actually did look at your CodeExtinquisher while I was looking around at some CRUD solutions for CI (I didn't know if CI followed the path of Symfony / RoR with a production "quality" admin). I liked what I saw but wanted to jump into the task of creating my own admin from scratch to get a feel for things. I wrote a quick admin with five modules including file and image uploads, etc. which was a nice way to cut my teeth on things like mixing POST and FILES together, etc.

What I was really after was more of an overall understanding of where CI should be installed if you're using it for a whole site, front end and admin together. It would seem to make sense to me that you could/would do it that way, although I'm not sure what the best practices are and would rather not start off going in the wrong direction or using the wrong methods to solve my problem. The admin I built before just manages the admin (well, it's on godaddy so it doesn't admin anything right now!) and the front end is just vanilla PHP, not riding on the framework.

I hope that makes sense?

Thanks again for your prompt reply,

Mike