On the MaltBlue.com blog today there's a new post talking about Zend Framework plugins and how they can help save you time in the long run, giving you more time and flexibility to create the applications you want.

During the recent development of the new PHP cloud development casts site, which has been developed with the Zend Framework, so much development time has been saved by using one of the simplest and arguably best features of the framework: Controller Plugins. So today I want to introduce you to them and walk you through a working plugin so you can see just how effective and efficient they can make your development workflow.

He starts with a look at the events that fire in the process of plugin execution (including "routeStartup" and "preDispatch") and as well as some common uses like inserting code at the end of a request automatically or redirecting a user if they're not logged in. Included in the post is a simple code example showing the setup of a simple plugin that redirects the user to the "/index/index" path if they're not already there.