One thing that is different between Zend_Config_Xml and Zend_Config_Ini is that with Zend_Config_Xml you can pass in an XML string as the first parameter of the constructor and it will work. This doesn't work with Zend_Config_Ini as we use parse_ini_file() under the hood. With PHP 5.3 however there is is a new function called parse_ini_string() which will allow us to load arbitrary ini string into Zend_Config objects. This can't go into Zend Framework 1 though… continue reading.

Posted on 20 June 2011 in Zend Framework 1

One area of displaying lists on web pages that I've generally disliked doing is pagination as it's a bit of a faff. Recently, I needed to do just this though as I couldn't delegate it as my colleague was too busy on other work. As a result, I thought that I should look into Zend_Paginator this time. Turns out that it's really easy to use and the documentation is great too. The really useful thing… continue reading.

Posted on 4 May 2011 in Zend Framework 1

A while ago I needed to ask a user for their date of birth on a Zend_Form. The design showed three separate select elements to do this: A little bit of googling found this site http://codecaine.co.za/posts/compound-elements-with-zend-form which has now unfortunately disappeared, so the code in this article owes a lot of the author of that article. It turns out to be remarkably simple to create a single Zend Form element that is rendered as multiple… continue reading.

Posted on 21 March 2011 in Zend Framework 1

I can't seem to find an article here that consolidates my thoughts on Zend Framework's view helper system, so I thought I'd better correct that. Zend Framework's Zend_View component supports helper methods known as view helpers. They are used like this in a view script: <?php echo $this->myHelper('myParam1'); ?> Behind the scenes, this is implemented as a method within a class something like this: <?php class Zend_View_Helper_MyHelper extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract { public function myHelper($myParam1) { $html… continue reading.

Posted on 14 March 2011 in Zend Framework 1

Let's say that you want to use your own view object within your Zend Framework application. Creating the view object is easy enough in library/App/View.php: class App_View extends Zend_View { // custom methods here } along with adding the App_ namespace to the the autoloader in application.ini: autoloadernamespaces[] = "App_" All we need to now is get Zend_Application to bootstrap with our new view class. There are two ways of doing this: within Bootstrap.php or… continue reading.

Posted on 16 February 2011 in Zend Framework 1