I recently received an email asking for my advice about how to handle a form that appears on every page. I want to add a newsletter sign up box to layout.phtml so it will appear on every page. The layout->content() comes from several different action controllers... So how do I handle the newsletter sign up? I thought that the answer is long-winded enough to be worth writing a blog post about. One way to do this is to use a action helper, so let's build a simple application to show this solution.

He walks you through the creation of the simplest part first - the form that will live inside of the view helper. He chose a signup type of form with a username, email and submit button. He helps you create an action helper and the view helpers to help inject the form into the layout of each page. Then, with a simple call to "$this->signupForm()" you can drop it in anywhere in the layout.

Whilst touring the web I found an interesting project for turning Apache Web Server log files into RSS feeds. This approach can be adjusted to monitor the maintenance needs of a web application deployed on an assumed productive system. Therefor a XML capable Zend_Log instance will be set up and the resulting log file will be transformed into a RSS feed via a custom Action Helper wrapping a XSLT transfomation.

He sets up the XML logger first, using the Zend_Log, Zend_Log_Writer_Stream and Zend_Log_Formatter_Xml to create the XML output from the logging. Then, with the help of the custom helper - Recordshelf_Controller_Action_Helper_Xslt - he reformats the XML output into an RSS feed ready for public consumption. (There's even a screenshot of what it might look like in a feed reader).