Rob Allen's DevNotes » Site

Three years of my Zend Framework Tutorial

Rob... — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:30:42 +0000

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?!

My tutorial is compatible with Zend Framework 1.9

Rob... — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:17:20 +0000

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.

ZF 1.9 looks like a really solid release too.

DNS Transfer

Rob... — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:23:32 +0000

Just a heads up, I am currently transferring the registrar for akrabat.com, so there may be an interruption of service here if I mess up :)

Zend Framework Tutorial for ZF 1.8

Rob... — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:30:53 +0000

Zend Framework 1.8, has been released!

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.

Let me know what you think :)

Shorter Link: A rev=canonical WordPress plugin

Rob... — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:30:40 +0000

Hot on the heels of my No DiggBar, I've created another extension for WordPress!

Shorter Links provides a tag in the section of your page with a shorter url and appropriate tags for use with the new revCanonical system. Further details can be found at laughingmeme.org, shiflett.org or benramsey.com.

The link created looks like this:

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 tag for this is:

Why not download Shorter Links and have a play?

Update, the latest version uses rel="shorturl".

Digg bar blocker for WordPress

Rob... — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:00:56 +0000

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.

Tip of the hat to John Gruber for the idea.

Update: The No DiggBar plugin is now available from the WordPress Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-diggbar

Fixing -- in WordPress

Rob... — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:50:53 +0000

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!

Busy

Rob... — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:34:31 +0000

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.

License for code published on this site

Rob... — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:01:10 +0000

A few people have asked me, so I thought I'd better make it explicit.

All non-trivial code on this site is released under the New BSD license as noted here.

For code examples that are a line or two long, I consider them added to the public domain.

Updated Tutorial for Zend Framework 1.5

Rob... — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:50:25 +0000

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!