Damon,

Take a look at the excellent mvc hybrid starterkit, has some good practices etc https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/hybrid-framework/

You could hijack by template or document type and you get to use a controller like MVC.

https://github.com/kgiszewski/LearnUmbraco7/blob/master/Chapter%2006%20-%20Surface%2C%20WebAPI%20and%20RenderMVC%20Controllers/01%20-%20RenderMVC%20Controllers.md

At the most basic level I used to have a "loader" class that would go off and populate a model for me and consume that on the page.

Currently I have a customc lass the inherits from UmbracoViewPage that can use AutoMapper to map an IPublishedContent to a view model. I'm manually mapping the fields in my mapper because the performance overhead was bad doing it with reflection.

    public abstract class StormViewPage<T> : UmbracoViewPage where T : class
{
    private T model;

    public new T Model
    {
        get
        {
            return model ?? SetModel(base.Model);
        }
    }

    private T SetModel(IPublishedContent content)
    {
        model = content.As<T>();
        return model;
    }
}


public class RichTextChildModelMapper : UmbracoPublishedContentMapper<RichTextChildModel>
    {
        protected override RichTextChildModel Transform(IPublishedContent source)
        {
            if (source.IsNullOrEmpty())
                return RichTextChildModel.NewNull();
            return new RichTextChildModel
                   {
                       BodyText = source.Get(Up.Common.BodyText),
                       Name = source.Name
                   };
        }
    }

  public static class PublishedContentExtensions
    {
        public static T As<T>(this IPublishedContent content)
        {
            return Mapper.Map<IPublishedContent, T>(content);
        }
    }

Like this.

There is also a package called Ditto that I think does the full Automapper pipeline https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/ditto/

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