On his blog, Padraic Brady talks about the creation of custom web pages (in the Zend Framework) with the help of the Zend_View enhancements that have been introduced lately.

With the inclusion of Zend_View Enhanced as first documented, discussed and publicized in this blog series, in the Zend Framework as of 1.5.0 I'd like to thank everyone involved in the process. [...] The main problem of a complex View, is that the current Controller is only aware of a subset of its own required Model (data) and the current View. So how do do you get the View to include extra sections - for example, details from Technorati for your blog - which are common to ALL pages?

Normally, a call to _forward() would have been the norm, but this was more often overly complex for what the developer wanted to do. The new Composite View and View Helpers seem to be the remedy. They make it simpler to grab that information and pull it in without the need to make a whole other framework request to do so.