How Do You Zend_View? I'll Show You Mine...

An interesting design decision made by the Zend Framework team was, well, not to make too many decisions about how the View portion of a Zend Framework MVC application should be implemented. You can use plain PHP to generate markup, use a templating library such as Smarty or Savant, or go your own way entirely. At work we've used both Wall4PHP, and subsequently a custom component-based solution, for example.

The flexibility is great then, but with freedom comes responsibility. Perhaps coincidentally, view scripts tend to be the part of a ZF app that attract the most cruft, the most untestable code, and the most mingling of concerns (though controllers certainly give them a run for their money).

Since someone recently asked, I'll show how I've implemented views on pointbeing.net. I don't claim that the approach is awesome, or even suitable for every case, but it seems to work for me. In return I'd very much like to hear or see how others implement their Zend_Views.

Zend_Session Overrides php.ini Settings

This post concerns some curious behaviour in Zend_Session. We spent about a day of developer time tracking this down, and I'm still a bit puzzled about it. It doesn't appear anywhere obvious in the documentation, and I haven't found a great deal on the web about it, so maybe this will save somebody some time, if nothing else.

Mobilising a Website, Part 2: Strategies

In Mobilising a Website, Part 1: The Problem I noted that this site is practically unusable when viewed using the browser on a mobile handset, and that I'd like to do something about that.

This time around, I'd like to size up some of the approaches and strategies that developers can take in order to make an existing website mobile-friendly.

Zend_Search_Lucene Quick Start

I recently had a spontaneous urge to add a search form to my weblog - this one you're reading right now - and it seemed like a good opportunity to have a look at Zend_Search_Lucene.

I'm really impressed with the simplicity and power of the module. Sadly the documentation, whilst extensive, isn't particularly clear - so here's a quick overview of getting Zend_Search_Lucene up and running.