The popular open source Zend Framework just got some slick enhancements. Learn what's new in V1.5 and how upgrades, including Zend_Form, Zend_Layout, and Zend_View, enhanced support for GData Web services, and improved Ajax support can help PHP developers easily roll out cutting-edge Web applications.

They walk through each of the new components (or features in them) like Zend_Form and Zend_Layout/Zend_View with examples included. There's also mention of other miscellaneous updates like the addition of OpenID and InfoCard support, a LDAP authentication module and an interface with Google's GData service.

With the inclusion of Zend_View Enhanced as first documented, discussed and publicized in this blog series, in the Zend Framework as of 1.5.0 I'd like to thank everyone involved in the process. [...] The main problem of a complex View, is that the current Controller is only aware of a subset of its own required Model (data) and the current View. So how do do you get the View to include extra sections - for example, details from Technorati for your blog - which are common to ALL pages?

Normally, a call to _forward() would have been the norm, but this was more often overly complex for what the developer wanted to do. The new Composite View and View Helpers seem to be the remedy. They make it simpler to grab that information and pull it in without the need to make a whole other framework request to do so.

The problem of maintaining a consistent look and feel while encouraging best practices is what Zend_Layout, as well as the Zend Framework 1.5 Zend_View enhancements, attempt to solve.

The recording (and accompanying slides) cover the updates made to these two components and how they help the goal of uniformity and give a "two-step" solution to make it happen. The presenter for the webinar was Ralph Schindler.

Somebody asked for some examples of how I use the headLink(), headScript(), and other placeholder helpers, so I thought I'd take a crack at that today.

He looks at the different categories of placeholders and illustrates with examples of each: Doctype Hinting, Content Aggregation, Capturing Content and finally, putting them all together into a custom layout that uses docType, headLink, headStyle and headScript.

As many know, Zend Framework 1.5.0 is almost ready for release... heck, it might even be released by the time you read this. There are a ton of new features worth looking into, but I'll list some of my own favorites here - the ones I've been either working on or using.

The list of updates for the release includes:

• Zend_Layout and Zend_View enhancements
• Zend_Form
• Zend_Search_Lucene
• Zend_Db_Table Improvements
• Context Switching and REST

If you want to get things prepared on your application, you can always download the latest release candidate (RC 3) of 1.5.0 and get to testing.

Videos that have already been posted to the section include setup videos part one and two as well as a look at working with the Zend_Controller and Zend_View components.

One of my biggest issues with using PHP as the templating engine in View scripts is that the easiest way to echo a variable is the least secure. [...] So, I decided to leverage a post by Mike Naberezny from a while ago about streams. The idea is all his; I just modified it to work with Zend Framework's Zend_View the way I wanted it to.

His method uses a slightly different output format - instead of using a normal echo statement to push out the escaped output, it uses a special syntax using the "@" sign as a shortcut to the call to escape(). He includes the code you'll need to make it work in your ZF install and explain it a bit (including where the real key lies - in stream_popen).

It's in the manual, but I thought I'd blog about my simple View Helper setup that ensures that I can get at the view with minimal effort. [...] his class contains the code required by Zend_View to collect an instance of the view and assign it to a protected variable. All my view helpers extend this class and so I can access the view using $this->_view.

His code creates a simple object that all of his views extend and make a single object that refers back to the view itself.