Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).

He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.

He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.

In this part of the series (part 5) they show how to:

• create PDFs
• use positioning in adding text, graphics, and shapes to the document
• manage long blocks of text
• stream out a dynamic PDF to the browser
• add information to an existing PDF document

Part six picks up where the previous part left off and includes information on working with emails in the Zend Frameork. They look at the Zend_Mail component and, making some minor changes to the application they've been constructing (the feed reader). They create an email notification to the user when a feed has been updated.

Code examples and the source code for both of these sections are provided.