There was some discussion on Twitter regarding the original version of my article about putting most of your site’s setup in the front controller plugins in Zend Framework. However, I haven’t seen a lot of real reasons except for “that’s what the example says” or “this is how I feel.” These suggestions I have are based on performance and logical reasons. However, I could be wrong or maybe I was unclear. So I did a... (more…)

I was creating a new application with Zend Framework at work the other day and I started using my technique that I described here by adding the original email in my email address using the + sign. However, the current organization I’m at has a mailserver (Exchange?) that is either configured not to allow this or just doesn’t have this functionality built in. So, this won’t work. I solved this with a new implementation of... (more…)

Thanks to Zend and their community organizers for the opportunity to do a webinar today. (more…)

All the examples I’ve seen for pulling information from subdomains are from the hostname router directly correlating one subdomain as a value to a single controller/action combo. This means they map username.website.com to something that basically looks internally like website.com/user/profile/var1/username. This is cool for simple one off tasks - however, what if you’re creating a multiple controller/action solution? For my example, I’m creating a CMS that will have a shared code base. However, on every... (more…)

There are two ways of working with Zend Framework as a library in your project. These are including it in your project repository and using a shared copy on the server (like PEAR). Let us discuss both: (more…)

For some reason, I just had the most horrible time making sure that my connection from my Zend Framework code was speaking UTF8 at my database. Here are the key things to remember that I learned: (more…)

Zend Framework has a few hooks with the Firebug browser plugin (with the FirePHP add-on). The two that I use are writing logs to the console and profiling of database connections. (more…)

Through reading a few blog posts over the last year and my own trial and error, I’ve developed a way of using the flashMessenger Helper in ZF that works out really well for me. (Note: if anyone knows the original blog post that I got some of the view helper from, please comment!). (more…)

One of the steps to install PHPUnit is to execute the following pear commands: pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de pear install phpunit/PHPUnit (more…)

Google Charts has a QR code generation service (here are the details). I decided that I wanted to create my own ZF View Helper to display these on my pages. This version that I am going to show just returns the properly formatted URL for the charts API. The view must create the img tag around it. (more…)