As he progresses more in his work with the Zend Framework (and learns along the way) Brandon Savage is sharing some of the handy new things he's come across. In his latest post he looks at the Zend_Navigation component and gives you an overview of how it all works.

I wanted to write a primer that others could use to get started with Zend_Navigation. This is a short guide to how Zend_Navigation works, and how you can use it to improve your application.

His primer starts with a bit of vocabulary you'll need to know before you get started - things like MVC pages, URI pages and containers. He helps you create Zend_Navigation-enabled pages, both a simple one that just makes an object and a more complex one that uses a tree structure (as defined in an array) to help build the navigation element.