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" />
