Hi Community,

I have a few questions about custom controllers:

From the documentation I read here
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=recipes:controllers#simulate_pages_with_controllers

I figured I should use a customer controller for my data instead of content controllers as my model is not content / page oriented.

So I created a first prototype using a custom controller as shown here:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=controller

and rendered it with $this->renderWith('MyTemplate') which all works fine so far.

However, I am missing some important functionality compared to using ContentController and SiteTree. Specifically:

- Can I use the template Hierarchy? renderWith() only seems to find templates in the root themes directory, but doesn't seem to be able to compose themes from templates and layouts. Is this strictly connected with the SiteTree model or can I enable the template/layout composing with custom controllers and renderWith as well?

- From the template, I can not access objects as I used to with ContentController, where I simply had a method MyObject() that would get called when I access $MyObject in the template. Again, is this functionality not possible with custom controllers, or what can I do to use this? Or, generally, how can I access my model from the template using my custom controller? I tried to use $this->customize() which appeared to be the answer, however this is also a ContentController method if I am not mistaken.