While possibly a great help and a way to speed development up, are database access classes like Zend_Db and others making people forget about SQL? ActiveRecord, Table Row Gateway and whatnot, are people trying to constrain their thinking inside the bounds given by these implementations?
Quick introduction to using Zend_Layout
Lately, the Zend_Layout component has been a very popular topic on #zftalk. It is indeed a very useful component, but a lot of people are having trouble understanding how it works. Adding to the confusion is the outdated documentation regarding the component proposal and the equally outdated articles about Zend/Xend_Layout. Let’s demonstrate the usage of the current Zend_Layout implementation, which …
Localize your site in 3 easy steps
Internationalization and localization means making your site usable in more than one languages. Well, to be honest, you could call a site that’s only in english localized to english visitors too, but in any case… These two are also known as I18N and L10N. Can you guess where these acronyms come from? The first and last letter from each word …
Routing and complex URLs in Zend Framework
We were talking about routing on the #zftalk IRC channel. One of the users mentioned that rather than using routes, he was using the __call method in the IndexController. I then asked him why is he doing that, as I knew routes would be more than a good choice for most kinds of URLs. I found out that he was …
How to automatically escape template variables in Zend_View
Escaping any data which comes from the server is important to escape, as it prevents XSS amongst other things. The Zend Framework view component Zend_View let’s you escape template variables with $this->escape($this->variableName), but it doesn’t escape them by default. Wouldn’t it be much nicer if it did that by default, or at least provided you with a variable to turn …
Summing up Smarty and Zend View
I’ve posted a couple of posts related to integrating Smarty with the Zend Framework: Making a Smarty view class based on Zend_View Integrating Zend View Helpers into Smarty I’ve also posted some Zend_View related posts: Using layouts with the Zend ViewRenderer helper Creating a factory-object for building views Let’s wrap up these in a summary of using them and what …
Different PHP template engines
Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera While working on the Smarty View Helper solution I mentioned in the previous post, I went through a lot of Smarty's code and I also did some searching on their forums. Smarty's code isn't very modification friendly and they had discussed associative array support for Smarty in their forums in 2003 …
The best Smarty + Zend View Helpers solution!
Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Coming on again with the Smarty and Zend View related articles, let's this time take a look at how to get Zend's View Helpers running with Smarty. Other examples for this that I have seen use a syntax like this: {helper helper=Url p='array(something)' p2=stuff}, which is kind of ugly and the …
Handling Ajax requests in the Zend Framework
Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Doing Ajax is quite simple these days with the various JavaScript libraries offering easy ways to do it. But how do you do it on the server side, without complicating things too much? Typically, in addition to the Ajax response, you need a traditional page response to a request as well …
LAN party place reservation
Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Let's take a look at one of my biggest PHP projects so far: Reservinator 1.0, or in other words, a very advanced place reservation system for LAN parties. The page is in finnish, but the post is not, so read on! If you've even been to a LAN party, you might've …