As a follow-up to his previous post on Zend_Navigation Brandon Savage takes a look at how to make it more useful by using some of the methods that come bundled with the component.

This is certainly wonderful and exciting, but the reality is that for the most part, Zend_Navigation is a pretty useless component of Zend Framework until you have a way to get the data out of the structure you’ve built. And since navigation is a component of most people’s views, we have a view helper to give us the tools we need.

This view helper, "navigation", gives you some interesting functionality including what he illustrates - fineOneBy, htmlify, building breadcrumbs, menu generation and a way to finally render the menu as output. You can see more of the options/methods in the Zend Framework manual for the helper.