I'm pretty new to the whole RoR thing (coming from a .NET background)
and have gone through some tutorials both in books and online.
In the tutorials the controllers / views make sense. But suppose I have
a layout, images, CSS, etc my designer has given me. The index or home
page has some general info, and might have some dynamic info coming
from the database.
The question I have is - do I create a controller just for this page?
It's not a page that is simply listing records, or a data entry screen
for a table (as you see in tutorials). It's a page with dynamic data
coming from possibly multiple pages.
If you do want dynamic data on the page, then yup, you need to create a controller. Many of us create a content_controller.rb for static pages. You can then specify routes that pretty up the URLs to the actions for this controller – e.g., map.connect ‘’, :controller => ‘content’, :action => ‘index’ would make the / path load the index action of the controller (assuming public/index.html has been removed).
If the page is completely static, you can place the content in public/index.html instead. The downside to this approach is that you have to duplicate the application layout in the file itself – it won’t be able to use any layouts in app/views/layouts.