In this recent post to his blog Matthew Turland show a way to make your Zend_Form implementations in your Zend Framework applications scale a bit better.

I came across an instance using Zend_Form recently where the level of flexibility offered was a bit of a double-edged sword. In order to provide maximum flexibility per form element instance, each has not only their own filter, validator, and decorator instances, but also a plugin loader instance for each of these three types of plugins. These add up quickly when you have a form with several hundred elements in it.

To prevent bloated code and redundant plugin definitions, he subclasses the Zend_Form component into a Custom_Form class that defines central plugin loaders for all of the elements so that when an element is created and a plugin is used, it will always pull from the centralized location rather than a (possibly different) custom one defined on the element.