Various Zend Framework Tutorials

The first part in a series on how to write a combination of a CMS and community with the Zend Framework and the Smarty templating system.

This article explains how to create a custom route and a custom router that use the database to determine which controller will be used. This is used because the writer wants to use short URLs like site.com/page and re-use controllers for multiple page-types in a CMS.

Implement multiple language support using the Zend Framework. This system will automatically detect what the likely language the user would be wanting to see and also allows them to change the language at anytime.

Like many frameworks, the Zend framework is fairly heavy by itself. Today, I decided to do some profiling on code running to see how all that load was distributed and see if there was any way I could pinpoint the problem to one particular location. I found a major one. Just to get things booted up and route the query to the appropriate method, over 40 files get included via require_once(). IO is definitely a problem here. I didnÂ’t keep the original cachegrind trace (from xdebug), but over half of the processing time was lost in those calls. Even if using APC or some sort of op-code caching, calls still have to be made and the code has to be retrieved.

Building a CMS system looks like a big task to most. Especially when the CMS has to be a custom job. The Zend PHP Framework will make things a lot easier to code and to maintain.

I've been experimenting with various pieces of the Zend Framework to get a better idea of how they work. I decided to put together a simple project using a few of them. What I wanted to do was create a class that allows the user to get stock quotes (and other stock information) from Yahoo! Finance, modeled after the Zend_Service_* classes.

The Zend Framework allows for websites that are search engine friendly, although some thought needs to be taken when building your application. Besides creating a website that has a better chance of performing well with the search engines, these tips will also make your site friendly for visitors. Believe it or not, building a site that is search engine friendly can also yield usability benefits.