To reduce the typing effort for the most common tasks in creating a Zend Framework based application, which are creating action controllers including their hosted actions and creating new models for accessing the underlying database, I spent some minutes to figure out how to create and add these valuable snippets to the default PHP bundle.

The contents of the examples snippets are included - one to set up a controller, one to add an action to it and an third that will automatically set a table name property.

So you figured out how to define the relationships between your Zend_Db_Tables and you have issued a call to findDependentRowset(). You get your Rowset back but you need to sort the results by one of the columns in the dependent table. How do you do that?

Unfortunately, he's found out that you just simply can't - well, not without a custom function (until the 1.5 release of the framework rolls around). He shows his table set up and some sample database classes to relate to the tables (and link between them). The magic comes in with his DU_Utils class that takes in the data and sorts it based on the given column name in the given direction.

In this article, I'll be introducing you to the Structures_DataGrid package, showing you how it can be used to display structured data in tabular form. I'll be showing you how to hook it up to various data sources (including a CSV file, an RSS feed and an Excel spreadsheet), and how to format the resulting output so it's as pretty (or as ugly) as you want it to be.

They talk about what you'll need to get started (the different packages for different kinds of data) and some sample code to help you down the path to more attractive tables. There's even a bit touching on some of the more advanced features like exporting to Excel, pagination and data sorting.

Migrations are a wonderful technique to keep your database in sync with your code. When working on a project as a team, migrations can save your life. Please join me and get a quick introduction to migrations in CakePHP and become a happier coder.

He starts by explaining what migrations are (yml files that contain database construction/destruction information), how to execute them in your application, and how to construct your own.