Tag Archives: Technology/Internet

Setting Up Zend Framework with Modules

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Typical Zend App

Typically you’ve one module in your Zend App – the default one. In the basic installation of the framework, you put all the controllers, models and views directly in the application folder, as described below.

/application
	- /controllers
		- /IndexController.php
	- /models
		- /MyModel.php
	- /views
		- /scripts
			- /index/index.phtml
/library
	- /Zend
/public_html
	- /images
	- /scripts

Bigger Apps – More Code

When the application becomes bigger and bigger the controller, models and views/scripts directories contain more and more files. That’s a bit odd, because it becomes difficult to maintain, and than the modules come in hand.

Modules in a Zend App

When it comes to setting up modular Zend App there are tons of articles in the web, but let me show you a simple directory layout and … sample code that sets up the framework.

/application
	- /modules
		+ /admin
			- /controllers
				- /IndexController.php
			- /views
				- /scripts
					- /index/index.phtml
		+ /default
			- /controllers
				- /IndexController.php
			- /views
				- /scripts
					- /index/index.phtml
	- /models
/library
	- /Zend
/public_html
	- /images
	- /scripts

Source

Simply add this into the bootstrap:

$frontController->addModuleDirectory(APPLICATION_PATH . '/modules');

HTML Tags: <base>

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Overview

base

Somehow the <base> tag remains unknown to most of the web developers, but that’s quite normal. However let see what it can do. By adding the <base> tag in the head of the page you tell every link into that page how to open and a default href value. Thus if you have:

<base href="http://www.stoimen.com/blog/">

every link without a href attribute will open this link. That’s really useful in some cases. However the most interesting part of the base tag is the target attribute.

target=”_blank”

Everybody knows what will result from this attribute attached to a anchor tag.

<a href="http://www.stoimen.com" target="_blank">Click Here</a>

But with only adding this base tag:

<base target="_blank">

into the head … all the links will open in a new tab/window, depending on the browser preferences.

Watch out!

If you add the line above somewhere into the <body> tag the browser, will put it into the <head> which will make it difficult to track. A good practice is to place it directly into the <head>!

Which Model Should Contain That Method?

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Let’s say you have two models – each one modeling a database table – Users & Article. Here there’s nothing to deal with Zend Framwork, but you can think of them as typical models in a ZF application.

What happens if you have to write a getUserArticles method? Where would you put it? Whether this will be the User model or the Article model?Where?

Although technically you can put it in both models my advice is to look at the SQL query. If the FROM clause is containing the user table – than put the method in the User model, but here you’d have something like:

SELECT * FROM Article WHERE user_id = 1

I’d prefer to place it in the Article model!

Setting Up Global Cache in Zend Framework

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In a large scale web application, especially based on Zend Framework, there are lot’s of components that support built in cache support. Such are Zend_Db, Zend_Translate, Zend_Date, etc. Also you may need cache support wherever in the app, so my advice is to setup a cache instance in the “beginning”, into the bootstrap.php or even better – into a front controller plugin, and to store it into the Zend_Registry. Thus you’ve to change only the lifetime for specific needs:

<?php
 
class CacheInit extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $frontendOptions = array(
            'automatic_serialization' => true,
            'lifetime' => 60
        );
 
        $backendOptions  = array(
            'cache_dir' => realpath(APPLICATION_PATH . '/../cache')
        );
 
        $cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core',
                                     'File',
                                     $frontendOptions,
                                     $backendOptions);
 
        Zend_Registry::set('cache', $cache);
    }
}

Than add it as a front controller plugin:

// cache plugin
$frontController->registerPlugin(new CacheInit());

Send Html Mails with Zend_Mail

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Zend_Mail
Typically you’d never like to send a non-html formatted mail from your web system. It’s ugly and it’s difficult to read. Instead of sending pure text, you’d like to add some images and styles. The way you can do it with Zend_Mail is simple enough. Replace the setBody method with setBodyHtml. Isn’t that natural?

// before
$mail = new Zend_Mail('utf-8');
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com', 'Sender Name');
$mail->setBody('message in Html');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'Recepient Name');
$mail->setSubject('Subject');
$mail->send();
// after
$mail = new Zend_Mail('utf-8');
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com', 'Sender Name');
$mail->setBodyHtml('message in Html');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'Recepient Name');
$mail->setSubject('Subject');
$mail->send();