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.
Cal Evans is reporting on DevZone that Zend Framework has won a “Jolt Productivity Award”.
Well done to the team and all the contributors.
The Register’s Developer section has a new article up about using Zend Framework to connect to an Oracle database using the MVC components. In the article, Deepak Vohra looks at creating a simple MVC application that creates a simple CRUD application using the Oracle Zend_Db adapter.
I’ve just posted a very simple example of how to use Zend_Form over on akrabat.com.
Once you’ve read it and seen the power of Zend_Form, the manual provides much more detail on all the elements available and how to use them.
Padraic has posted about Dependency Injection and Zend Framework:
When you start mucking about with objects you eventually realise that the best way to get objects working together towards a unified objective, is through composition. In other words, objects use other objects, which in turn can use others. You end up not with a restrictive inheritance tree, but a pool of objects injected into each other to build up an overall purpose. The problem of course is how to inject one object into another!
Padraic talks about what dependency injection is and why it is so good and how to use it for testing your code. Well worth a read.
When you are in need of help with the Zend Framework, these are some places that I go:
If you want to discuss ZF in real time and maybe get a question or two answered, then join the IRC channel #zftalk on freenode.
There are also forums at http://www.zfforums.com/ but I’ve never used them. Worth checking out though if webfora is your media of choice.
Where else do you go for ZF help and discussion?
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!)
