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

Recently, a couple of people have very generously donated their time to translate my Zend Framework Tutorial into their native language to help their fellow countrymen. Firstly, Mario Santagiuliana has provided an Italian translation: Introduzione allo Zend Framework. Secondly, Radosław Benkel translated into Polish and I'm hosting the PDF here: Pierwsze kroki z Zend Framework.pdf. Thank you both!

Posted on 24 January 2011 in Zend Framework 1

One thing you may have noticed with Zend Framework projects that use the baseUrl() view helper to reference CSS and other static files is that it doesn't work if the URL contains contains index.php. Let's explain, by using code from the tutorial. In the layout.phtml file, we link to a CSS file like this: <?php echo $this->headLink()->prependStylesheet($this->baseUrl().'/css/site.css'); ?> This code uses a baseUrl() view helper that looks like this <?php class Zend_View_Helper_BaseUrl { function baseUrl()… continue reading.

Posted on 17 January 2011 in Zend Framework 1