Pragmatism in the real world

Zend Framework Tutorial for ZF v0.8

A few people have asked about updating my Getting Started tutorial for version 0.8 of the Zend Framework. I finally had a chance to check the code and it worked fine with no changes (as expected!) Darren, one of my colleagues as recently gone through the tutorial for me and found some typos, so I have put out a new version (1.2.4) that fixes these. I've also updated the code too to make it slightly… continue reading.

Upgrade time

Just a quick note to warn you that the server that akrabat.com runs on is going to be upgraded tomorrow, so expect serious downtime as we see what happens when you go from FC-old to FC6 ! All should be back up and running by the evening though!

PHP UK Conference 2007

I've just come back from the PHP UK Conference (2007) held in London. It was a one day event with five speakers. I took a few photos, but most didn't come out too well as ISO 400 sucks on my camera! Cal Evans introduced us to mash ups and the pain of getting an API key from UPS! Simon Laws talked about SCA which was new to me and I thought it was a very… continue reading.

Indonesian Translation of the Tutorial

Riki Risnandar has done some sterling work and translated the tuorial to Indonesian! Thank you very much Riki! You can download the PDF directly and it is also listed on the main tutorial page.

Zend Framework Tutorial for 0.7

Just a quick update to let you know that version 1.2.x of my Zend Framework Tutorial does actually work on version 0.7 of the framework with no changes. This is because the public API for the MVC components in 0.7 are backwards compatible with 0.6. I expect that from now on, the basic API for the MVC will stay the same. More advanced stuff, like the module support might change though.

Modules

One of the new features to hit the Zend Framework since 0.7 is Zend_Controller_ModuleRouter and its sibling Zend_Controller_ModuleRewriteRouter. This allows for separating out sets of controlers, models and views into their own modules. The directory structure then looks like: application/ controllers/ IndexController.php ArticleController.php blog/ controllers/ IndexController.php models/ views/ news/ controllers/ IndexController.php ListController.php models/ views/ models/ views/ lib/ Zend/ webroot/ css/ img/ js/ index.php To set this up, you use this code in index.php: $frontController->setControllerDirectory(array( 'default'… continue reading.

Subversion's svn:externals

I know everyone else is already doing it, but I've only just got around to working out how svn externals works and why it's quite cool. I've got a Zend Framework application that I'm working on in subversion and it has a lib directory which contains a zf directory. The zf directory is a checkout of the latest trunk version of the framework. Up to to now, I've been doing this manually. Today I sat… continue reading.

New Theme

Thought, I'd have a go at understanding WordPress themes! The image at the top is an actual road sign on my way to work, which has unfortunately been removed by the council. If you see anything broken, let me know please as I've only actually tested this in Firefox! (I know it's broken in IE…)

Simplified Chinese version of the Zend Framework Tutorial

Not only has Jason Qi found a lot of typographical and lexical errors in my tutorial (I know, I know.. you'd think by now I'd have found them all!) but he's also translated it into Simplified Chinese! Download the PDF from his site now! Thanks very much Jason.

Extending Zend_View_Interface for use with Smarty

Zend Framwork v0.6 has introduced new MVC code and one of the changes is that Zend_View_Interface now exists to allow for easy implementation of other templating engines other than PHP based ones like Zend_View or Savant. We use Smarty at work and when we migrate our content management framework to Zend Framework, we intend to continue using Smarty. Hence, I've created AkCom_View_Smarty to play with how we are going to use Smarty within the Zend… continue reading.