Extending Controllers
Spotsec has posted about Extending Zend_Controller_Action and keeping init() and everyone should read it!
Essentially he is saying that when you extend Zend_Controller_Action, you should put your initialisation code into the constructor rather than init(). The tricky bit is that Zend_Controller_Action’s constructor takes two parameters which people seem to forget about. If you don’t include them, then everything breaks.
We do this at work (and we use control+click to find the function signature, not google!)

