In the previous installment of this series on Zend_Form decorators, I looked at how you can combine decorators to create complex output. In that write-up, I noted that while you have a ton of flexibility with this approach, it also adds some complexity and overhead. In this article, I will show you how to render decorators individually in order to create custom markup for your form and/or individual elements.

So, instead of registering them with the Zend_Form element, he shows how you can pull out the one decorator (with a getDecorator call) and render it separately. It can be simplified even more with the renderSimpleInput method called on the decorator object. He gives a use case example in defining a form that needs more exact control over the layout.