New listings

Yet more Zend Framework -related material. I've talked with a few people about using Zend_Acl and how to best approach the issue of resources, roles and users. It isn't immediately obvious how one should do this: - Create roles and resources in code? - Load them from a database?

Since I prefer ADODB over Zend Framework's own Zend_DB, I had a small problem: How to use it with Zend_Auth to authenticate the user? Good thing Zend employs smart people: they use an adapter to control the database access in the Zend_Auth class, called Zend_Auth_Adapter. You can define your own authentication adapter quite easily by creating a class which implements the Zend_Auth_Adapter_Interface interface class.

I've seen two articles describing how to integrate Smarty with Zend_View, Integrating Smarty with the Zend Framework at Zend Developer Zone and Zend Framework: Using Smarty as template engine at Dmytro Shteflyuk's blog. Both of these are very outdated by now. So here's take three on integrating Smarty with Zend_View, this time hopefully staying useful for a longer time since the Zend Framework has reached version 1 now.

Being the buzz-word worshipers that we are, several voices have been heard in the the Zend Framework community for a YAML parser class, and most notably, for a Zend_Config implementation based on YAML. Pádraic Brady already proposed an implementation for Zend_Yaml, but for those of you who are impatient (like me!) and want to use YAML as configuration files in your projects today, here's a simple and elegant solution:

I’m starting to get hooked on the Zend Framework’s abstraction to the PDO

Yet another demonstration of the power of the Zend Framework. This works with ZF Version 0.8 as well as the recent release of 0.9.(x?) This time we’re going to create dynamic breadcrumbs that might look like this: Home / Article / Editing: My Post Title Utilizing view helpers, all we need to do is do a little prep work; in my case, I use a bootstrap controller that all my controllers extend.

Today I was toying around with new code architecture. Previously, how I might have implemented a Model would have been something similar to this:

It's been a long, and hopefully interesting, road to Part 7. In this concluding entry to the long running, and oft delayed, "Complex Views with the Zend Framework" series I introduce the Zend_View Enhanced Proposal for the Zend Framework, elaborate on its operation, and provide some opinions on the ongoing debate over its implementation. So sit back, relax, here's another long (be patient ;-)) blog entry.

As I'm not very challenged by doing monotonic and repetitive work, as the building of custom controller and model classes of the Zend Framework is, I crafted an automation solution for these two tasks using Phing. The tasks I wanted to automate were the creation of custom controller and model class by calling a build file. So I wrote two templates deriving from Zend_Controller_Action and Zend_Db_Table including some common methods used in all my controller/model classes like i.e. getModelInstance() in any custom Zend_Db_Table derivation.

After spending too much time on directory and view script shifting to align an 'older' Zend Framework application to the very useful ViewRenderer Action Helper of the follow-up releases I crafted a single Phing buildfile to stick to the recommended conventions and to have a nearly 'one-button' setup solution for any upcoming projects.