I have a few discussions here about the question I opened a couple of days ago: how the standard form processing is related to the Controller/Action idea and how developers that are creating sites with the standard Folder/Page approach can use Zend Framework's Controller/Action approach.

What came out of the discussions were three points - use the Controller/Action model to your advantage, use your own forms but use RewriteRouter to make them work, or use the Folder/Page mentality instead.

I am using a subfolder of web root to play with the ZF and was having troubles getting my controller to go to the correct place. After considering hacking both the Apache doc root and the actual Zend_Controller_Router code and writing a patch, I stumbled on the answer - Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter.

She includes the quick code that acts as a patch for the framework, letting it know that the directory it should be rewriting to isn't the root of the domain.

This question I had heard many times and now I have a few minutes to write down the answer so that everybody who stuck in the similar trouble could quickly resolve the issue. Who works with Zend Framework, most likely, have read the "Zend_Controller / Getting Started" Zend Framework manual article, which explains how to use Zend_Controller in the root folder of the web server. But it does not answer on the "How to run my Zend Framework application in a subfolder of the web server document folder?" question and I propose you my solutions.

First is rather a hack then a recommended solution, but with it you can start the applications and examples that use standard router. The second is neater but it depends on the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class.

The first method makes some changes to the default routing code itself (the hack) to make it no longer just use the REQUEST_URI, but to look at more of the URL to see if subdirectories exist. OF course, the more preferred way to go, and just as simple of an option, is using the framework itself to change the RewriteRouter options to allow for the subdirectory.

While getting the hang of the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter, which is now included in Zend Framework 0.1.5, I was adding the routes in my index.php (bootstrap) file and wondered if there was any way of storing them elsewhere. It is possible to loop over Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter::addRoutes() but the method I will describe here is based on some recent updates to Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter by its author Michael Minicki.

His example shows the creation of some simple routes with this new functionality - creating the route definitions, loading them in, creating the object for them, and passing it into the front controller. It's as simple as that!