The Zend Framework in Practice

The previous post discussed the implementation of the Login Controller; in this post, we will look at the implementation of the view script associated with the login/index action. (more…)

Following on from my overview of authentication and access control, I intend to first look at the implementation of a Login controller. This will handle two basic request: /login and /login/logout. These correspond to a user’s attempt to login via the login form, and a logout request, typically via a page link. (more…)

One of the most common, but often complex to implement, features of websites is the facility for users to log in and out of the site, thus allowing them to view content and perform actions that would otherwise be denied to them. The Zend Framework does not provide a single all-in-one component, since the possible approaches are so diverse, but rather provides separate components for authentication (Zend_Auth) and access control (Zend_Acl), and a mechanism for incorporating them into the dispatch process (controller plugins). (more…)

To quote the Lightbox 2 website:

Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

I decided to add the script to the GM-RAM website in order to allow visitors to view full-sized versions of the screen shots there without having to navigate to a separate page. (more…)

I have described how to use Zend_Feed to retrieve a digest of a blog’s latest entries in a previous post. In the overall implementation described in my series of posts, this digest is fetched every time a page is loaded. Although, by using AJAX techniques, this does not slow the loading of the basic page, it does result in some unnecessary repetitive work, since the blogs are not updated that often. In this post, I shall look at how I am using caching on the recently revamped GM-RAM website to save the results and reuse them. (more…)

I have just put up the latest version of the GM-RAM website. In appearance, it is very similar to the old site; the main visual changes have been the switch to a three column layout, and the decision to dispense with jQuery UI tabs on the site pages. The content has hopefully been improved to make it clearer what GM-RAM does, including some of the projects we have been involed in. (more…)

This article looks at how to dynamically create a Google sitemap.xml file for your Zend Framework site. It assumes that you are using Zend_Navigation to describe the basic layout of your site. It also assumes that the application is based on Zend_Application and uses Zend_Layout. (more…)

This post looks at a simple custom resource plugin that I’ve recently created for populating the registry with values from the application configuration file. I have already examined adding a Log plugin and a View plugin in previous posts; the basic technique for adding this one is the same. (more…)

Books or articles about PHP or JavaScript have usually been pitched at the novice programmer; this is fine if you are a novice programmer, but as someone with considerable experience of C++ and other such languages, I don’t fall into that category. As a result, I find these works tend to finish at the point where I’d like them to begin! For me, the chief merit of Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP by Quentin Zervaas is that it is pitched at a higher level, and therefore addresses the sort of topics that I am more interested in. (more…)

When a user is asked to enter a new password, it is customary to ask the user to repeat it, in order to reduce the risk of it being entered incorrectly. In the Zend Framework, there is a validator that can check whether two items are identical, but using it with Zend_Form is tricky, because it needs the values of two fields to make the comparison, while validators are attached to a single field, independently of the others. This article looks at how to use Zend_Validate_Identical with Zend_Form. (more…)