The Zend Framework in Practice

The blogs page on the GM-RAM website is used to display details of the company-sponsored blogs, including a digest of the five most recent posts. Like the other pages on the site, it displays its content within a series of tabs. The first tab simply contains some general comments about the blogs; each blog then has its own tab.

In this next series of posts, I shall look at how the page is implemented. The blog digest is not fetched before the bulk of the page is rendered, as there may be a noticeable delay before it is fetched and therefore before the visitor receives a response. Instead, the page renders each blog tab with a placeholder section, into which the digest feed is loaded using AJAX techniques.

The posts will deal with the following aspects of the implementation:

1. The index/blogs action handler
2. The index/blogs view script
3. The AJAX feed digest helper
4. The feed/digest action handler
5. The feed/digest view script
6. The feed digest helper