PHP Style

As you may know in PHP you can access everything in the request uri by accessing the global $_GET array. If there is something like that in the browser’s address field: www.example.com/index.php?controller=index&action=test, you can simply get the values by that:

echo $_GET['controller']; // this will print "index"
echo $_GET['action'];     // this will print "test"

Zend Framework, Uri & Request Params

If you code with Zend Framework, you should know already, and that’s perhaps the first thing you’ve learned about Zend, that $_GET params can be accessed by calling the requrest’s getParam() method. But first of all the request uri will be different. The Zend’s convetion is to place after the domain name first the module name (which is omited when there’s only one module), than the controller’s name followed by the action and the key value pairs of all parameters. In that scheme the request uri above will look like that:

http://www.example.com/index/test

Here the keywords “controller” and “action” are omitted. This is cool – it’s more user friendly and it definitely helps the SEO.

Get the $_GET

Once the uri is setup like so – /index/test you can access it via the Zend way:

echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('controller'); // this will print "index"

The cool thing is that in the first case you don’t have any prevention of a missing value, while in the second case there is a second parameter or the getParam() method that does this job. What if the uri is www.example.com/index.php?controller=&action=test than by printing the $_GET['controller'] you’ll get nothing. In other hand even this:

echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('action');

won’t return “test” if the uri is http://www.example.com/index/

Note: actually here the default “index” action will be referenced!

That’s where the power of the framework comes. In the first case the solution is:

echo (empty($_GET['controller']) ? 'default': $_GET['controller']);

while in Zend there’s more elegant solution:

echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('action', 'test');

Thus when the action param is missing the “test” value is considered as default! Very useful!

There are some really good reasons to use Zend_Translate for your multilingual site instead of some other technique. Actually you can definitely simulate something like this Zend component with and array or ini file, but here are some good things to mention.

1. Write a human readable source file

In fact you can do this even without Zend_Translate. Image you’ve an ini file with some pairs like:

lblMyLabel = "My Label"

Nobody says this cannot be “more” human readable – like so:

My Label = "My Label"

Than you can support several files i.e. en.ini, de.ini, etc. where you can translate this label. The problem is that once you read the ini file you’ve to deal with those white spaces into the labels, while with Zend_Translate you can simply call them with:

$translate->_("My Label");

2. Default values for missing labels

Zend_Translate forces you to define a source file. Which is really great, because you always have a default value. Assuming that you don’t have a specific label translated in one of the ini files, you’ll get the default value from the source file, and defining source and other files is as easy as:

// en.ini
My Label = "My Label"
 
// de.ini
...
 
// while the locale is de_DE you'll have 
// the default value returned
$translate->_("My Label"); // will return My Label from the en.ini

3. Locales

It’s really great that you can directly setup a locale for this module. Thus you have more flexibility when switching between languages and you can benefit from the power of the framework when reading some browser specific locales. Here’s some code:

$translate = new Zend_Translate('ini', 'en.ini', 'en');
$translate->addTranslation('de.ini', 'de');
 
// than when you setup the translation locale
$translate->setLocale('en');

4. Cache

One of the greatest things about Zend_Translate is the native support of cache. It’s so cool! Actually the labels of a large web system are pretty static and don’t change every day. In other hand in large scale systems there are lots of labels, and the load time will be faster with cache.

$frontendOptions = array('lifetime' => 600, 'automatic_serialization' => true);
$backendOptions  = array('cache_dir' => 'path_to_cache_dir');
 
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'File', $frontendOptions, $backendOptions);
 
Zend_Translate::setCache($cache);

It’s a great advantage to use Zend_Translate after all this. Actually I have finished projects without any use of it, but I really can’t imagine how I’ll work now without it!

That’s really a good Zend Framework’s class that help you do the encode/decode job very easily. First of all it escapes everything for you and second it prints a correct/valid code. Note that sometimes if you have a trailing whitespace after the closing PHP tag – ?> that will result in an error.

Here’s some code:

public function jsonAction()
{
	$data = array(3,4,'test', 'my-name' => 3,4);
 
	echo Zend_Json::encode($data);
 
	$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
	$this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
}

and the result is:

{"0":3,"1":4,"2":"test","my-name":3,"3":4}

Note that all integers are printed without double quotes – which saves some space!

Action – View

You may know that every controller’s action in Zend Framework has to be bind to a view. Normally you can disable the view for a specific action, but how about “forking” an action to render different views?!

In example when some _GET parameter is set redirect to another view? That’s rather strange and perhaps there’s a clear and yet full MVC solution! First of all you can setup all of the view variables simply in the “parent” action.

<?php
 
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		$this->view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
	}
}

Than the view file will contain something like:

// index/index.phtml
<h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1>

Than whenever you have the given _GET set you can _forward to another action (perhaps with no code at all) and only a different view. Thus you don’t setup twice the view variables.

<?php
 
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		$this->view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
 
		if (isset($_GET['my_param'])) {
			$this->_forward('another');
		}
	}
 
	public function anotherAction()
	{}
}

And there are two views practically for one action:

// index/index.phtml
<h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1>
 
// index/another.phtml
<h2><?php echo $this->title ?></h2>

It seems there is a strange problem with Zend_Feed and an entry pubDate property?!

I’ve added the very minimum of properties for a feed entry – title, pubDate, link and description, but the resulting date is … the current date instead of the date specified in the pubDate property? Is there any way to fix it?