Pragmatism in today's world
Update: This position has now been filled. So… we seem to be in the same position as everyone else and are looking to hire a new, great, PHP developer! From the spec: Big Room Internet are looking for a great PHP software engineer to bring depth to the team and spearhead our future development. You will be working across a range of projects, ideally with experience in seeing through a project from start to finish.… continue reading.
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.
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.
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.
A couple of weeks ago, the 2011 PHP Benelux conference was held near Antwerp. This was the first time that I've been to this conference and I was very impressed by it. I presented two sessions that seemed to go down well which was nice. I travelled to Belgium with Ryan Mauger on Thursday and we had a poor journey that took around 12 hours to get there. Our first flight (10:45) was cancelled, and… continue reading.
Possibly the most frequently asked questions about my book Zend Framework in Action is whether it is going to be updated. I'm delighted to be able to announce that Ryan Mauger (aka @Bittarman) and myself have agreed with Manning to write a new book on Zend Framework 2.0. to be called Zend Framework 2 in Action! It's very early days, so we have planned the Table of Contents, but have very little manuscript. The current… continue reading.
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!
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.
PHPUK, the conference organised by the PHP London usergroup is being held on Friday 25th February 2011. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, then you should! I'll be there talking about optimising a Zend Framework application, which should be interesting. I'm going to be looking at what's slow in the ZF code itself and have been profiling using xhprof which is the first time I've used it. It's quite good, once you have it… continue reading.
Tim de Pater of Enrise has written a new article on how to integrate MemCacheQ with Zend Framework application using Zend_Queue_Adapter_Memcacheq component: For www.nd.nl (a Dutch newspaper) we wanted a simple and free queue mechanism that integrates with Zend Framework for handling a number of jobs. We found MemcacheQ. The article then goes through how to run the memcacheq daemon and then shows the PHP code to add a job to the queue and then… continue reading.
