Zend Framework

This week's update to BaseApp includes:

• Inclusion of phpdoc into all BaseApp classes


• Integration of Xend_Layout with example layout usage


• Implementation of complex error handling, allowing for easy module specific error controller usage


• Minor modifications to smarty inclusion to allow for easier usage

As always, you can download from the BaseApp downloads page, or pull down the latest version directly. The next integration will be an ORM layer and an administration abstraction.

Minor update today for BaseApp. Updates include:

• Changed Smarty integration to extend Zend_View_Abstract instead of implement the base interface


• Removed the free-form class autoloader and replaced it with basic Zend_Loader to promote better coding standards and portability


• Various small tweaks to move towards being in line with ZF coding standards (phpdoc to come soon!).


• Updates to the BaseApp information pages

You can always get the latest version of BaseApp from the BaseApp downloads page, or pull down the latest version directly.

Thanks to Naneau, SpotSec and other visitors of #zftalk on irc.freenode.net for the continual ZF conversation!

After spending some time playing with the recently released Zend Framework, I decided to build a core layer to sit on top of the framework to make it easy to be able to quickly jump into development. Once I started, I also saw a lot of people on various ZF related forums and in #zftalk on irc.freenode.net asking for examples of various integrations and implementations using the framework.

Unfortunately for the community, most of the examples that are readily available use older versions of the framework and are no longer functional or don't utilize some of the newer functionality properly.

So, I've put up an early copy of BaseApp - an application core layer built the Zend Framework (direct download). Features in this alpha version include: a modularized component structure; main application controls, logging and configuration; graceful Smarty template integration; basic content structures controls with search engine friendly URLs; and class autoloading and easy deployment capability.

First off, if you haven't checked out Zend Framework, the first official release came out earlier this week. It takes a little bit to get around and learn the structure if you haven't seen it before, and probably a little bit longer still if you aren't familiar with things like design patterns, but this is the first really solid effort towards a framework for PHP 5.

Now, you've spent some time reading through the framework site, the documentation, whatever, and you're ready to get started. But the default link structure is not very search engine friendly and you want to dig into some different routing. What to do? Try out this content path router route, based on the other routes provided within the Zend Framework. This router will match all URL structures that end in either the Uri delimiter (/) or the content extension (default .html) (( but not /.html, )). The page and path will be set as request parameters so that your controller can determine if that particular page is supposed to exist based on whatever logic or business rules you decide.