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Zend_Feed provides functionality for consuming RSS and Atom feeds. It provides a natural syntax for accessing elements of feeds, feed attributes, and entry attributes. Zend_Feed also has extensive support for modifying feed and entry structure with the same natural syntax, and turning the result back into XML. In the future, this modification support could provide support for the Atom Publishing Protocol.

The class constant Zend_Version::VERSION contains a string that identifies the current version number of Zend Framework. For example, "0.9.0beta".

In the previous article I introduced a method to describe routing information within a configuration file built specially for the Zend_Config object. The example code I gave was done in XML, but itÂ’s worth reiterating that the same can be done with an INI file or a file containing a PHP array. Now IÂ’d like to extend the Zend_Controller_Front class to automate the retrieval and use of the configuration settings we capture in our Zend_Config object. WeÂ’ll use the Zend_Config object to create and build out a Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter object. Once weÂ’re done, weÂ’ll simply set it to our front controller like normal (almost), and dispatch our HTTP request.

Continuing from my post last week of notes on the Zend Framework, I’d like to provide some pointers on using helpers with views in a much more automated way. Just as views can be automated—that is, you don’t have to instantiate a Zend_View object; the controller does it all for you when you call $this->render() from any controller action—you do not have to explicitly tell Zend_View where your helpers reside, as the manual suggests. Instead, place your helpers in a special “helpers” folder where the Zend_Controller_Action’s initView() can find them.

Half the trouble in conceiving of a extended View system is agreeing on terminology. Everyone has their own idea of the basic concepts, but without names we're left with vague descriptions. Here I'll throw out some terms, some borrowed, others mangled slightly, the rest fairly obvious. These terms all describe specific rendering processes. Methods of capturing presentation logic in neat parcels which carry specific consequences, follow object oriented practices, and provide (we dare hope) commonly sought functionality.

The 4th part of an excellent tutorial on creating an ajax chat system using MySQL and the Zend Framework.

Whilst touring the web I found an interesting project for turning Apache Web Server log files into RSS feeds. This approach can be adjusted to monitor the maintenance needs of a web application deployed on an assumed productive system. Therefor a XML capable Zend_Log instance will be set up and the resulting log file will be transformed into a RSS feed via a custom Action Helper wrapping a XSLT transformation.

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. I could have also build my own extended base classes and let my custom controllers/models derive from them, but for the sport of it I didn't.

If youÂ’re like me youÂ’ve probably followed the Askeet tutorial on Search in order to create a decent search engine for your web app. ItÂ’s fairly straight forward, but they hinted that when Zend Search Lucene (ZSL) is released, that might be the way to go. Well we are in luck, ZSL is available, so letÂ’s just dive right in. If you arenÂ’t using symfony have a look at this article from the Zend Developer Zone. It covers just enough to get you started. If you are using symfony, just follow along and weÂ’ll get you where you need to go.

At ZendCon, I heard there was a new version of the Zend Framework being released. The version number is 0.2.0. That does not sound very stable, but I decided to give it a try anyway, something I did not do back when 0.1.0 was released. This was quite an adventure. The new release is incorporating major changes in the MVC framework and quite a few other libraries. Most of the changes in the MVC section are made to improve testability, or so I was told. Since new changes may break a few things, they were placed in the incubator folder until the next major release. This seemed all right to me.