The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial they posted recently on using the Zend_Tool component to make starting a new Zend Framework application from scratch a much simpler thing.

This tutorial will set you through using Zend_Tool to jump-start development on your next ZF MVC application. Zend_Tool is both RAD tools as well as a framework for exposing your own set of tooling needs to the Zend_Tool user interface. While the areas in which extending Zend_Tool are exhaustive, we will focus merely on obtaining and using the current Zend_Tool toolset.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the component, how to set it up correctly as a "binary" and how to automatically create a new project with a simple "create project" call. He also points out the ability it has to define some of the basic files for actions of your choosing.

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a article posted from Matthew Weir O'Phinney spotlighting one of the handy features of the Zend Framework - Action Helpers.

Action Helpers in Zend Framework are often considered a fairly arcane subject, something for experts only. However, they are meant to be an easy way to extend the capabilities of Action Controllers, negating the need to create your own base controller with custom functionality. The aim of this tutorial is to show you how to quickly and easily create and use Action Helpers to your advantage.

He covers some of the basics - setting up a controller to extend Zend_Controller_Action - and assigning helpers to it. He looks hat hooking in events, registering and retrieving the helpers with a Broker and how to create your own custom helper. Their example is a form loader that lest you load the code for a form by submitting its class name.

Raphael Stolt has posted a new entry to his blog that talks about combining two things that many developers out there already use - the Zend Framework and the TextMate editor. He shows hos to make some useful code snippets that can be customized to whatever you might need.

To reduce the typing effort for the most common tasks in creating a Zend Framework based application, which are creating action controllers including their hosted actions and creating new models for accessing the underlying database, I spent some minutes to figure out how to create and add these valuable snippets to the default PHP bundle.

The contents of the examples snippets are included - one to set up a controller, one to add an action to it and an third that will automatically set a table name property.

Jonathan Snook has posted about a method he's using to make the creation/use of static pages in a CakePHP application (or website) simpler.

Traditionally in a CakePHP application, to do static pages you have two options: use the built-in Pages controller or set up an empty action in a controller.

Feeling that neither of these two options met how he wanted things to work, Jonathan (and Nate Abele) developed a class that extends the error handler in the CakePHP framework to handle "missing" actions and controllers. This means that, if an unknown controller/action combo is called, this script will check in its correct location (in the structure of the site) and try to find it to render it.

On the Zend Developer Zone a new post points out feature that the controllers of the Zend Framework has - parameters on the actions.

Basically, Zend_Controller_Action is the parent of all of the controllers in your application. This controller is what C stands for in MVC, a design pattern used lately in web application development, especially in RIA development.

The post includes a tutorial on using the parameters in an example of a design pattern.

Raphael Stolt has posted a (pre)review of the upcoming Manning Publishing book "Zend Framework in Action".

For the last few days I've been reading the MEAP release of Zend Framework in Action from Rob Allen and Nick Lo published by Manning Publications and as a pre-review I'd like to share my reading experience. Currently there are 6 of totally 16 intended chapters available, to find out if them are already worth the money you might want to read further.

He describes to book, talking about some of the contents (of the parts he's read) including the intro to the framework, a closer look at the MVC architecture, Ajax integration, a close look at the model structure and some authentication functionality.

Martin Brotzeller came across an interesting behavior in a script he was recently working on involving two classes and an error that should have been thrown.

Over the weekend i encountered a twist in PHP that really left me wondering. I made a mistake and i thought i should have gotten an error, or at least a warning. I got a completely unexpected behavior instead. According to our PHP Oracle this is just a legacy from PHP 4 though and there was much Discussion whether changing this behavior would break old apps. I think it's a possible source of hard-to-track errors though.

His code creates an object, a and calls the bar() method. Inside bar(), object b is created and the foo() method of b is called. The real oddity comes in when, inside the b->foo() call, $this->mprint() is called but it's the one defined in object a that executes, not in b.

On the AnyExample.com website, there's a new tutorial showing how to create an XML-based website that uses XSLT for its templates.

XML and XSLT technologies provides standard ways of separation of presentation and data. This article contains an example of simple php "xslt engine" for XML driven web-sites which implements caching techniques and Apache-based XML file processing.

They start by setting up the web server to parse all XML file requests through a handler script using Apache's directives. Following thi ssetup, there's three code blocks, one for each of the "moving parts" of the sample application - the XML content, the XSLT template to style it, and the PHP to bring them both together.

In a new entry to his blog today, Richard Lord takes a look at how to gracefully handle 404 errors in a Zend Framework application (via a custom plugin).

Early versions of the Zend Framework had a noRoute action that was called when the correct action couldn't be found. This was a way to deal with some page not found errors. At some point it was dropped - I don't know when or why because I only started using the Zend Framework recently. It's still possible to handle non-existent actions using the __call() method of the controller class. But there's no obvious way to deal with all page not found errors in one place, including instances where the controller doesn't exist.

The framework makes it easy to create actions link to controllers, but there's still a problem when a requested action isn't there. His plugin has a solution to that - it is fired off when the action requested doesn't exist and automatically reroutes it to the "noroute" controller to be handled.