Rendering multiple actions

I’ve had like two hours with Rails so far :slight_smile: So pardon me for being a
total newbie.

Once a site grows larger, it needs to render a lot of content on any
particular page. For instance, a news box, a “last forum posts” box,
main content, a “related links” box etc. etc. It gets even worse if
it’s a sort of search/informational/portal thing of sorts.

So my question is this. How do you effectively combine these things
onto one page? Do you create a master layout (for the whole
application, presumably) and call “render” for each action that you
want included? What if rendered content needs to switch places or
additional content needs to appear basing on various criteria? Do you
do a “render unless” and “render if” all over the place?

What’s the best way to takle this?

Thank you