Best practice/Strategy Question

I have a main layout for my page and instead of making it really long I was thinking it would be nice to modularize things such as stories/ categories/tags/tools. To me it seems like each of these different sections should be in a different controller, for instance a controller to query the database, pull all the relevant tags and display them, but they all need to be on one page at once. I hope that makes sense. My question is how should I solve this problem. Should I render each section as a partial, passing in variables to the partial. Should I write a long layout and do before-filters in each one of my controllers to get all the info for the tags/categories, or is there a solution altogether I am missing. Is it possible to render an action as a partial? Thanks in advance!

JB