Rails - Jul 2005 - Newbie: recursive controller invocation / portal solution

Hi all,

I''m new to rails but I have some experience in constructing
portal-alike web sites in PHP.
I want to create website in Rails, which exploits concept od portlets,
set of various independent usually simple applications glued together
into one page.

I previous version of Rails, I was able to render another
controller/action into string, render more of them, and then sent it
to client as one page. Although I had some unfinished work such as bad
generated URLs, I thought this was the right way to get it work.
This was few weeks ago.

Now this part of ActionController has changed in new version and there
is new set of rendering command around render(). I can''t find
something similar to achieve the same result, and render :template =>
"controller/action" isn''t replacement, AFAIK.

As my previous attempts were only exploring tries, I don''t remember
exact methods which I was working with to grep sources and find
something more useful.

Is there a common way of reentrant invoking of controllers, or simply
building portals (to be human readable :))?

Thanx a lot.

RK