Custom Zend_Application Resources

Sooner or later, you want to leverage Zend_Application better by creating your own resource plugins. This lets you reuse your initialisation work in multiple application that much easier and keeps your Boostrap class that much shorter! In my case, I wanted to create a resource for CouchDb that checked that the database was created and if not, create it. Creating your own plugin is easy enough. The obvious place is library/App/Application/Resource and a typical resource… continue reading.

Posted on 11 January 2010 in Zend Framework 1

Zend Framework on a shared host

When you deploy a Zend Framework website to a shared host, you usually cannot change the DocumentRoot to point at the public/ folder of the website. As a result the URL to the website is now http://www.example.com/public/. This doesn't look very professional, so we'd like to remove it. The easiest way, given a ZF project created using Zend_Tool is this: Create /index.php < ?php define('RUNNING_FROM_ROOT', true); include 'public/index.php'; This uses the index.php already created by… continue reading.

Posted on 8 January 2010 in Zend Framework 1

Speaking at TEK·X

I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at TEK X in May, in Chicago. This is one of the big US PHP conferences and I feel privileged to be invited. I'll be concentrating on Zend Framework with a tutorial called "Building a Zend Framework application" and a talk on "Working with Zend_Form". After a couple of less technical talks recently, it'll be fun to dive into more technical content. Hopefully, I'll be… continue reading.

Posted on 6 January 2010 in Conferences

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

I've recently been looking at different version control systems, specifically distributed ones like git, Bazaar and Mercurial. At IPC I was talking to Travis Swicegood about wanting to learn and he very kindly organised a copy of his book for me to review and learn from. I didn't know much about git at all before reading the book. I do now :) It turns out that git is fairly easy when you have a good… continue reading.

Posted on 5 January 2010 in Review

2009 in pictures

Like last year, my wrap up is mostly an excuse to show off some of the photos I took in 2009! January Other than the snow, The big thing that happened in January was that an article I wrote was published in php|architect. February We had daffodils in snow at the start of this month and then towards the end, the PHPUK conference took place. March Spring arrived in March. The Severn Valley Railway had… continue reading.

Posted on 1 January 2010 in Me

PHP Advent 2009: On deployment

This year I was asked to write an article for PHP Advent 2009 an it's now been published! Automate your Deployment is a look at how to automate the process of deploying your application to the web server. At my company we started automating our deployment systems just over a year and the number of issues we have around deployment of new code to a website has dropped considerably and is no longer a stressful… continue reading.

Posted on 6 December 2009 in PHP, PHP, writing

Accessing your configuration data that's stored in application.ini

Zend_Application will read the data in your application.ini and make it available from your bootstrap's getOptions() method. It then sets the bootstrap as a parameter in the front controller. Note that the top level keys are all normalised to lowercase too. You can then retrieve the options in a number of ways. In the controller you can do this: public function someAction() { $bootstrap = $this->getInvokeArg('bootstrap'); $options = $bootstrap->getOptions(); } Outside of the controller you… continue reading.

Posted on 27 November 2009 in Zend Framework 1

IPC 2009

The International PHP Conference 2009 took place last week in Karlsrule, Germany. This conference has presentations in both English and German, though fortunately, there was always at least one English session in each time slot! I managed to get to a fair few sessions. Cal Evans' talk on Zend Framework command line applications was an especial highlight as it's an area that we could do better and I now know how to! Similarly, we recently… continue reading.

Posted on 23 November 2009 in Conferences

Zend Framework URL Rewriting in IIS6

I've written before about URL rewriting with IIS7's URL Rewrite module. IIS6, which ships with Windows Server 2003 does not have this module though and guess which version my client's IT dept run? As usual, they wouldn't install ISAPI_Rewrite or one of the other solutions for me. In the past, I've simply written a new router that creates URLs with normal GET variables, but this is ugly and I wanted better. One thing IIS6 does… continue reading.

Posted on 16 November 2009 in Zend Framework 1, zendframework

ZendCon 2009

I know I'm late on this one, and I only have the pathetic excuse of being busy. However, ZendCon 2009 was a great conference and I want to thank Eli, Zend and S&S for putting it on. I gave two talks; a Zend Framework Certification refresher tutorial and a talk on project management. Overall I was happy with how both talks went. I think that my presentation style has improved considerably over the last year… continue reading.

Posted on 13 November 2009 in Conferences

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