Pragmatism in the real world

OT: A Bit Wet

An off topic post for this blog, but I thought I should mention that it was a bit wet yesterday and it took me 4 hours to do my usual 30 min commute from work back to home! A couple of pictures show it better: Just after I'd left work: Joining the M50: I got home easily enough – mainly it was a case of taking it easy which wasn't difficult as the traffic was… continue reading.

Russian and Polish Zend Framework Tutorial

A couple of new translations of my Zend Framework tutorial have crossed my desk in the last week. Kubek Bartosz has very kindly created a new up to date Polish version of my Zend Framework tutorial. Alex Musayev has created a Russian translation too. I say this a lot, but I really am still amazed that people think that my little tutorial is worth the effort of translating. Thank you very much guys. I'm sure… continue reading.

Two-Step view in Zend Framework 1.0.0

Paulo Nei wrote an email to fw-general which is, I suspect a very common issue that people are going to run into: Hi, I wanna put header & footer in all view templates. But with ZF I don't got an easy way to do it … At the moment, the Zend Framework doesn't have an "officially blessed" solution, so there are multiple approaches being used: 1. Front Controller plug-in. http://www.nabble.com/Controller-and-View-Question-tf3462561.html 2. Zend_Layout proposal. http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFPROP/Zend_Layout 3.… continue reading.

Zend Framework 1.0 Released

No doubt everyone who reads this blog already knows that Zend Framework 1.0 has been released. My code contribution isn't very large, but I am nevertheless very happy that Zend_Config "just works" for loading and reading configuration data. The MVC system within Zend Framework has come on by leaps and bounds since the first public release and is now flexible, robust and easy to use. One part of the MVC jigsaw that is missing is… continue reading.

Spanish versions too!

I am a little late in announcing this as my email inbox is overflowing and I missed the mail :( Claudio Cossio has translated both my Zend Framework tutorial and my Zend Auth Tutorial into Spanish! Thanks very much Claudio.

Would have made me laugh…

.. if I didn't identify so much with it. This was written in 2002, but is very relevant to my job today. If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

Zend_Auth tutorial in French

Just a quick heads up to let you know that the team at developpez.com have created a French version of my Zend_Auth tutorial. The French version of my tutorial, Débutez avec le Zend Framework, has also been updated in line with the 1.4.0. version. Thanks guys!

Notes on using Oracle with my tutorial

William Graham has been playing with the Zend Framework and Oracle using my tutorial. His notes are very useful if you want to get my admittedly MySQL-centric tutorial working with Oracle. I've come across that uppercase field name thing before in an application I wrote at work that needed to transfer some data from Oracle to SQL Server. Took me a while to work out what was going on. I'm a little confused about the… continue reading.

Extending ViewRenderer to Support Layout Templates

Contrary to what my tutorial says, I'm one of those people that doesn't want to have to render my common header and footer templates in every single view script file. I prefer a standard site-wide layout script file that will display the content of the action script files within it. The Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer action helper is a great bit of code that automates rendering a view template based on which action has been called. This is… continue reading.

Tutorial 1.4.0

Zend Framework 1.0.0. RC1 is out and with it a new action helper called ViewRenderer. This is a great action helper that handles the View integration with the Controller. As as result, the controller action functions are simpler and so I've updated my tutorial to reflect this. It's not a big change though: just remove all calls to $this->render() and $this->initView() in the controller!