The Zend Framework in Practice

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…)

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…)

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…)

Any web application that retrieves large amounts of data for display is bound to have the need to split that data over several pages. Developing the code to do this from scratch is not trivial, so it is extremely useful that the Zend Framework has the Zend_Paginator module, which assists with this task. (more…)

The feed digest helper is used to fetch a list of the most recent items posted on a blog, using its RSS feed. (more…)

The view script for the feed/digest action is straightforward. If there is an error, that is rendered; otherwise, the feed digest is displayed. (more…)

The feed controller digest action handler is used to render a list of the five most recent blog posts on the specified blog, as exposed by the blog’s RSS feed. (more…)

The implementation of the AjaxFeedDigest view helper is contained in the file AjaxFeedDigest.php, which is located in the /application/views/helpers directory. (more…)

As with the other pages, the view script for the blogs page makes use of jQuery UI tabs. The special feature of this page compared to the others is that the number of tabs is dependent on the number of blogs in the database. (more…)

The Default_Model_Db_Mapper_Blog class is used to manage data exchange between the Default_Model_Db_Blog and the Default_Model_Db_Table_Blog classes; this exchange represents reading data from and writing data to the database. (more…)