Dagfinn Reiersøl, the author of PHP in Action, has recently posted an article about how to test a Zend Framework action controller. He uses SimpleTest, but the ideas will work equally well with PHPUnit if that’s your preferred testing framework.
It’s a good read and once you’ve read it you should buy his book!
James at GM-RAM has posted an article called Producing a Feed Digest using Zend_Feed. In the article he talks about how Zend_Feed can be used to consume RSS and Atom feeds and produce a digest from them.
He includes sample code that shows how to create a view helper that is responsible for retrieving the feeds and then creating the the HTML output.
I also recommend having a browse through his other articles about Zend Framework as clearly GM-RAM have been using ZF on quite a few projects.
According to news coming out from @media, the BBC will be using Zend Framework for the presentation layer for bbc.co.uk.
Federico of PHP::Impact has more information here.
The benefits of Zend Framework that have been identified are:
It’s good to see Zend Framework being used in more and more places.
It seems that A2 Hosting are now pre-installing Zend Framework.
This will make deploying a Zend Framework application even easier!
Pádraic Brady has started a series of posts on his blog, building an example blog application. From part one:
The series will culminate with a complete blogging solution for my personal needs. I’ll cook it, bake it, beat it into submission, and then deploy it to replace this existing Serendipity installation. Along the way I’ll revisit numerous Zend Framework components, and probably praise or dissect them for problems or shortcomings. Along with my own mistakes, no doubt!
Part two continues by looking at the MVC architecture which is a good introduction into the design pattern and a must read for everyone!
Christer has written a tutorial on writing custom validators for Zend_Form_Element.
He covers how to ensure that two fields are the same:
The thing I also want to do is to ensure that the two email elements have the same value. The same goes for the two password elements. To do this I had to write a custom validator for these cases. A similar validator can be found in the Zend_Form docs but I wanted to be able to specify the names of the element(s) an element must be equal to when I add the validator instead of hardcoding them in the validator classes (like the example in the docs does).
He includes full source for the work he’s done so it is easy to follow along.
Robert Bolton has posted a book review of Zend Framework in Action:
At times I felt like there may be too much ancillary topics covered, however, after finishing the book, I felt overall it was good that topics such as testing, deployment, and version control were covered. While there isn’t enough information to provide in depth coverage, it exposures the reader to these topics and provides enough information to get started, rather than just briefly mentioning it. And the coverage of the different components with the Zend Framework is comprehensive and understandable. If you are looking at working with the Zend Framework, I would definitely recommend this book.
He finds both good and weak points in the book and we will, of course, see what we can do to address the issues raised.
Federico Cargnelutti of PHP::Impact has posted a comphresensive list of ZF tutorials covering a significant cross-section of the components within Zend Framework.
He’s found tutorials for:
If you need to know something about these topics, then it’s probably worth bookmarking the post.
Magento, the open source eCommerce platform has reached version 1.0, it’s first production release. Magento is fully featured offering many features including multiple websites, single page checkout, coupons, internationalization and many more.
Magento uses Zend Framework behind the scenes and so if you want to see one way to build upon ZF to create a fully featured application, the source may be worth investigation.
Last week, Ralph Schindler’s webinar on Zend_Layout and Zend_View was released along with the slides in PDF format. Cal has the details on Devzone. Ralph has also released a demo application showing how to put into practice the ideas he talks about.
