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