The PHP::Impact blog has a new tutorial posted today with a look at a refactoring of the front controller of the Zend Framework to make it a bit more manageable.

One of the most fundamental decision in object design is deciding where to put responsibilities. No one, and I mean no one, gets it right the first time. That's why refactoring is so important. As Kent Beck puts it, refactoring is the process of taking a system and adding to its value, not by changing its behaviour but by giving it more of these qualities that enable us to continue developing at speed.

He follows the "extract" refactoring method that makes things simpler by removing unneeded parts of the code (in favor of an interchangeable external "extract class". He removes seven methods from the class and splits them off into their own. This reduces the controller down to a more manageable size and takes a lot of the complexity out.

In a new blog post today Evert Pot shares some of his thoughts on integrating the Zend implementation of the OpenID protocol, Zend_OpenId, into his application.

The Zend Framework has a pretty good OpenID library. I was looking for a library written for PHP5 (strict), and this seemed like a good choice...

He mentions some of both sides of the argument - (the good) the flexibility of the library to work with different backend storage methods and (the bad) the requirements it has for the Zend Framework sessions system for authentication.

On the Developer Tutorials site there's a new tutorial providing an introduction to the popular PHP framework, the Zend Framework.

I find myself constantly bombarded with questions from students and co-workers I've introduced to the Zend Framework regarding how the different components can come together to form a basic application. I've searched, I have found, I have emailed great tutorials, but still the most common questions are posed "What's should I include in index.php?", "Should I use Zend_Db_Table?", "And what about Zend_Form?"

It gives the usual overview of setting up an application and how its all structured but it also includes a specific look at the Zend_Form, Zend_Db_Table, Zend_Registry and Zend_Cache components.

On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico takes a look at the history of using models in components within the Zend Framework:

More and more users are finding it difficult to load models within Zend Framework modules. This is strange, considering that modularity is an important design principle and its goal is to design systems that are easier to extend, understand, design and manage.

He brings in quotes and examples from different developers' blogs talking about their use and brings it up to the present day with an example of using a Zend_Module_Front controller with a Zend_Module_Action in a simple example of a module-specifc method for using a model.

In a recent post on his blog David Otton shares some of his thoughts on a major struggle between web developers (and not just PHP ones) - frameworks versus libraries.

We all know that loose coupling is good and tight coupling is bad, so why, over the past couple of years, has the web industry gone nuts for tightly-coupled frameworks?

He talks about the evolution of the framework, how Ruby on Rails really popularized it and some of his experience with a few of the PHP ones (CakePHP, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony). Of those he experienced, he felt that that strongest player of the group was the Zend Framework. It allowed for the framework feel and functionality but provided enough separation to be able to drop in libraries and configure custom settings easily.

Stefan Koopmanschap had a problem - adding a link to a Zend Framework form (Zend_Form) built from an XML definition:

I was quickly told by the friendly people in #php_bnl on irc.freenode.net that I needed to use Decorators for that, so I went diving into the documentation. Reading the official documentation, I couldn't really get into how exactly the decorators worked and what I could do with them.

It was this article on the Zend Developer Zone that helped him the most, though. He explains his solution, defining the Decorator with a setDecorator method call, and includes the one-liner that made it work.

In this new post to his blog today, Matthew Weier O'Phinney mentions the death of PHP4 and (the main focus) gives a preview of what's to come in the next version of the Zend Framework (1.6.0).

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

Daniel Cousineau has posted a "quickie" over on his blog today dealing with error controllers in a Zend Framework application.

In my quest to do some alterations on ZF error handling (in particular, render the view if the action or controller is not found, makes it real easy for my designer to prototype) I had the desire to be able to allow modules to have their own ErrorControllers. Unfortunately, the Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler() default does not allow for this and I didn't really want to extend that class (I planned on handling the rendering in the ErrorControllers) so I wrote up a quick plugin.

His plugin (code included in the post) hooks into the routeShutdown part of the routing process and overrides the default error handler for the module to pass the request off to his custom one.

Henrik has posted the second part of his look at using Doctrine, this time in combining it with Smarty. (Check out part one here).

We are creating an MVC setup where M is Doctrine, V is Smarty and C is our own stuff we do here. The Zend Framework has been reduced to just another component library for me now, I will pick goodies when I need them.

He shows how to be "empowered, not stifled" by the framework and to combine the two technologies in a flexible, lightweight platform. His example is a simple signup form that, on submit, saves the information to the database via the Doctrine layer.

In this recent post on the Invoke Media blog Andrew Liem takes a look at the Zend Framework and shows how to create a simple site from install to execute.

This article is aimed at php developers who are looking to learn more about how not to reinvent the wheel, in particular, with the new Zend framework. This is not a comparative list of all php frameworks, as there are many good ones out there, CakePHP and Symphony to name two. I've evaluated other frameworks to some degree, not exhaustively by any means, and the Zend framework seems to fit nicely with my requirements. It may not for you, but I'll try to persuade you in this article

He introduces the framework first including a brief touch on MVC, the DOJO integration and its power and flexibility. From there he lists the tools you'll need to follow along with him, setting up the framework and creating a very simple site in it based on a pre-generated database (with the typical create/read/update/delete functionality).