Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)
Three years later and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for Zend Framework as you can tell since the latest version of the tutorial supports ZF 1.8 and 1.9 and uses the new features like Zend_Application and the command line Zend_Tool scripts. And I wrote a Zend Framework book!
I wonder what will happen in the next three years?!
I've just updated my tutorial to version 1.6.3 after checking that it is still compatible with version 1.9 of Zend Framework.
The only changes I had to make were:
ZF 1.9 comes with its own BaseUrl view helper, so there's no need to write our own.
ZF 1.9.0's command line tool doesn't work on Windows. I've created patches on issues ZF-7464 and ZF-7465. I'm sure this will be sorted with 1.9.1 though.
To celebrate, I have completely revised and updated my Zend Framework tutorial to support the new Zend_Tool command line tool and Zend_Application for bootstrapping.
By default, the shorter url is simply {your domain}/{post id}, but the plugin also creates a custom field called "Shorter link" once a post is saved, so that you can change the shorter link to a more memorable set of characters.
Rather handily, Simon Willison, has produced a bookmarklet called Shorten so you can find out if the page you are looking at has a shorter link or not.
As an example, my Zend Framework Tutorial page has a canonical URL of http://akrabat.com/zend-framework-tutorial. I have set up a Shorter Link of http://akrabat.com/zft which will redirect to the correct page. The <link> tag for this is: <link rev="canonical" rel="alternate shorter" href="http://akrabat.com/zft" />
The DiggBar is a URL shortening service that puts your website within a frame on digg.com. As a result, the user sees Digg's URL, rather than your URL in their address bar, no matter which page they navigate to on your site.
I don't particularly like this, so I've written a small plugin for WordPress that removes it. Go to the No DiggBar page to download it.
One thing that I've noticed is that whenever I used -- in a post, such as this one, WordPress converted the -- to &emdash; which whilst very pretty doesn't work so well for people trying to understand command line switches to ./configure!
Today, I finally got around to poking into the WP source code to work out what was happening and I tracked it down to the wptexturize function in the wp-includes/functions-formatting.php file. Once I knew the name, it was trivial to google for a solution and I found Jason Litka's Disable wptexturize plugin. I couldn't find it through WordPress' new built-in plugin installer, so I installed it the old-fashioned way and now the code in my posts will make more sense!
I'm kind of neglecting this blog at the moment. Sorry.
I was away last week and I'm head down into editing Zend Framework in Action. It's amazing how many details the technical proof reader and our copy editor have found. The book is going to be so much better as a result. I need to go through each suggestion though and ensure that the meaning hasn't changed and to implement the suggested technical changes.
When I get a little time, I'll try and write up what I've learnt recently about testing with Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase which has reduced the testing scaffolding that I had by around 50% or so.
Zend Framework 1.5 has now been released to mark the occasion I have significantly updated my Zend Framework Tutorial! The tutorial was first released on 16th August 2006 and was written against version 0.1 of Zend Framework and had one major revision to bring in support for the ViewRenderer component.
The new tutorial produces exactly the same application as before, but now uses the new 1.5 goodies of Zend_Form and Zend_Layout, so you can see how these key components fit into a Zend Framework MVC application.
As always, when you find bugs and typos, please let me know and I'll fix them!
