Writing Admin/User/Public controllers to insure authentication

Thanks for the thoughts, mwhitney.

Honestly, I think that when it comes to modifying the controller hierarchy in a CI application, almost anything is going to, eventually, become a bit hackish.

I don't think this is unique to CI. I think that if one did not write the framework, one usually ends up hacking something to make it one's own. I remember someone saying ot me "by the time you finish any engineering project, you've already thought of a dozen ways you could have done it better."

In terms of best practices, if I were to implement something from scratch I would probably look into overloading the loader to allow me to load base controllers from the controllers directory. After dabbling in the guts of the loader and MX_Controller a few times, though, I really don't know how long I'd remain interested in doing it myself.

I'd strongly recommend registering an autoloading function in a pre-system hook. You can say goodbye to include/require statements and stop worrying about inheritance.