The Zend Framework in Practice

Zend_Navigation is a Zend Framework component used to represent the pages on a web site and transform this into things such as page navigation and Google sitemaps. The standard navigation resource plugin Zend_Application_Resource_Navigation can be used to configure an instance of Zend_Navigation.

In the sample application, each of the site pages is added via a block of settings in the configuration file, which take the following form:

resources.navigation.pages.home.type = "Zend_Navigation_Page_Mvc"
resources.navigation.pages.home.label = "Home"
resources.navigation.pages.home.id = "home_page"
resources.navigation.pages.home.controller = "index"
resources.navigation.pages.home.action = "index"

The sub-element after pages (here home) is set to a unique name for the page. The purpose of all the settings for this element are as follows:

• type: This inidicates how the page location is represented. It is either Zend_Navigation_Page_Mvc, when the module/controller/action associated with the page is specified, or Zend_Navigation_Page_Uri, when a straightforward URI for the page is given.
• label: This is the string used when rendering the page name.
• id: This is the unique ID used to identify the page.
• controller: This is the controller associated with the page (see type above).
• action: This is the action associated with the page (see type above).

All the pages are of the type Zend_Navigation_Page_Mvc; the other settings are as follows:

• home: Home, home_page, index, index
• about: About Us, about_page, index, about
• contact: Contact Us, contact_page, index, contact
• blogs: Our Blogs, blogs_page, index, blogs

Zend_Application_Resource_Navigation will create a container object. It will then populate it with page objects based on the settings in the configuration file.

We will look at how the Zend_Navigation object is used in rendering the page navigation and sitemap in later posts.