In a new post to his blog Matthew Turland takes a look at one of the concepts it's more difficult for those new to the Zend Framework to wrap their heads around - models.

A question that frequently comes up in my interactions with other developers about Zend Framework is how to approach designing models. There's a small collection of resources and advice that I generally give on the subject, so I thought I'd write up a blog post to give people an easy place to access it all.

He talks about the "correct" way to create a model - guess what, there's not one - and some suggestions of other resources that can give you some suggestions. He both defines what a model is and mentions a few things to consider in your development:

• data encapsulation
• handling dependencies
• defining default adapters to make access simpler