Akra’s DevNotes

I'm extremely pleased to announce that there is now a German translation of my Zend Framework Tutorial.

I'm still gob-smacked that someone thinks that it's good enough to be worth translating and am very grateful to Daniel Messer for doing it! He intends to host the German version himself when he has his web site organised, so that will be the place to find the latest version and to comment on issues specific to the German version. Until then, if you leave comments here, I'm sure Daniel will find them :)

Thanks again, Daniel!

Last night, the West Midlands PHP User Group met at The Swan pub in Worcester for some food and a chat. One of the discussions we started, but didn't finish was on directory structures and I thought I'd write down my current thoughts.

The Top Level

I like to keep everything within a project root directory and the top level directories are quite easy to define:

    project-dir/
                   app/
                   lib/
                   tmp/
                   scripts/
                   www/

Let's consider these directories in reverse order of my personal certainty of how to organise them :) Read the rest of this entry »

Another minor update with some more bugs fixed. Thanks Holger and Develucas!

I've also added an explicit note that the tutorial only works with version 0.1.5 of the Zend Framework. Supporting the development trunk from subversion would be too much work for me!

I intend to have a good look at the whole rewrite base thing and see if I can work out what does and doesn't work.

Tomorrow, I go to a (hopefully) final meeting with my client to wrap up the deployment of my first Zend Framework application. It's gone very smoothly as a project all in all and is all over bar the shouting.

So what have I learned? In no particular order:

• Automatic rendering of the template from within the Action's destructor is more hassle than it's worth! It's better to have a render() method and called $this->render() at the end of the action functions that need it.
• Setting up conventions for the names of templates and layout files is a big win. I put this functionality in AkCom_Controller_Action and it made it much quicker to add new actions to a controller.
• Creating a controller action class for this application was a good idea. This allowed me to put specific functionality for this application in a common place. All the other actions derived from it. I can see me doing this in all my apps from now on.
• Application specific Zend_View helpers are a Godsend!
• I created a classes directory within my application directory which has a directory structure similar to the Zend Framework's. This allowed me to easily override and extend ZF classes as necessary and also a place to put application specific view helpers.
• I suspect that I will come up with an AkCom Application system that will facilitate creation of my Zend Framework applications. It'll be quite lightweight, but will do the "grunt" work of setting up the directory structure that I've found to work for me.

Beware this beta! A new theme is in the works and it wasn't ready when beta 2 was released…

I use Windows Classic and the tabs are terrible and don't follow my system colours at all.

Very very odd. I'm assuming it'll be fixed by the release of Firefox2 as the regression list is long and being tackled. Jed Brown covers the actual problems in more detail.

Other than the theme, Firefox2 is shaping up quite nicely :)