Zend Framework in Action

Ben Scholzen has posted a screencast showing how to use the new ZendTagCloud component that will be in Zend Framework version 1.8.

The video goes though how to create a tag cloud where each tag has a title, weight and optional URL. ZendTagCloud will automatically render the tags as unsigned lists with appropriate font sizes to show the relative weights of each tag.

He then shows how to style the list so that it looks like a traditional tag cloud that you see around the web.

Posted by Rob on 29th April 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off

The march towards the release of version 1.8 of Zend Framework continues with the first beta release. From the announcement:

Please download and test this release thoroughly over the next few days so that we can fix any urgent issues or documentation problems before the final release next week. Please remember to provide feedback on our issue tracker and ask any questions on the appropriate mailing list. Again, the Zend Framework community does NOT recommend this release for production use. We do, however, recommend evaluating new features in this release with existing and new applications.

Download and test your sites now!

Posted by Rob on 23rd April 2009 under News | Comments Off

Thomas Weidner has written up how to receive files with ZendFormElement_File. If you are having problems trying to get a file uploaded properly, then have a read and it should all become clear.

Posted by Rob on 17th April 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off

Ben Scholzen has written an article about using multiple Zend_Cache objects in your application.

When creating a huge application, you mostly have to keep caching out of your development environment, but want to fully control the caching backend in your production environment, without all the calls to the Zend_Cache factory in your models or controllers. I had to struggle with the problem in the past sometimes, and came to the conlusion, that a singleton-factory would solve this issue very well.

He then goes on to show code samples of how to create a factory of cache objects for use in your application.

Posted by Rob on 16th April 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off

Some how I missed this, but Colleen Dick has published a review of Zend Framework in Action!

This is the good bit:

But the main thing is that they build a real web app, complete with a lot of the typical messiness web apps entail. It’s one thing to talk about a class, function, or method in crystalline isolation, but when I see it in use in something I can relate to in the real world, that’s when it clicks for me. Plus, there is actually ZF functionality devoted to handling those messy “real world” details, such as deciding what stylesheets, includes, and javascripts to load for a particular page.

Head over and read the entire review as it also has some fair criticisms.

As always, don’t forget you can ask questions over at the forum.

Posted by Rob on 15th April 2009 under Around the web & Reviews | 1 Comment »

Zend Framework 1.8 preview release is now available and you should check out where ZF is going. As this is a preview, it’s not ready for use in production though. Grab your copy over at the downloads page and test your app with it!

Matthew has the full rundown about it, but, the key new features in 1.8 are:

• Zend_Application for consistent bootstrapping.
• Zend_Tool, a command line client for setting up your project directory and maintaining it.
• Amazon EC2 and S3 support
• Zend_Navigation for menus, sitemaps, breadcrumbs and so on.

And lots of other improvements and bug fixes!

Posted by Rob on 8th April 2009 under News | Comments Off

Matthew Weier O’Phinney has just posted the first of a series of articles on Zend_Form’s decorator system.

Zend_Form decorators all implement a common interface, Zend_Form_Decorator_Interface. That interface provides the ability to set decorator-specific options, register and retrieve the element, and render. A base decorator, Zend_Form_Decorator_Abstract, provides most of the functionality you will ever need, with the exception of the rendering logic.

I strongly recommend that everyone reads it!

Posted by Rob on 3rd April 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off