That said, I try to load data in the controllers whenever I can, just to keep things a bit more organized for myself. And that’s why I created this plugin callback system – so I can load plugin-specific variables on a site-wide basis while still keeping everything organized.

Thanks for the feedback and the discussion!

I’m not very familiar with MVC theories or other project’s implementation, but I feel that there should be some sort of mechanism to allow Views to retrieve data from Models in cakephp.

From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller, it mentioned the following:

A view queries the model in order to generate an appropriate user interface (for example, the
view lists the shopping cart’s contents). Note that the view gets its own data from the model.

Also, have a look at http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/MVC-detailed.html

My implementation of the WidgetHelper relies on the assumption that WidgetComponent has been created. That component acts as a data puller, and sends the data back to the ‘element’ via the widget_data variable.

So, in any view you’ll be able to do:

$widget->element(
‘News’ /* Model to use */,
‘news/latest’ /* element views/elements/news/latest.ctp */
);

which then will call the NewsWidgetComponent::latest() function, which in turn calls News model to retrieve data. You can then render the returned widget_data as you wish in element latest.ctp.

I’ve been looking for ways to do something like this as well.
I considered your post, looked through AD7six mini controller, and some other stuff.

But I will probably take a shortcut and violate MVC a bit more

Here’s my current attempt: http://github.com/rchavik/cholesterol/blob/master/views/helpers/widget.php

– rchavik