Padraic Brady has kicked off a new series of blog posts with part one posted today - a look at the creation of a sample Zend Framework blogging application.

Starting any new application is like walking into a shop and being dazzled by the displays. You want everything but finally realise you only have so much resources to spend. So you isolate the specifics you must have, and focus on those.

This first part focuses on the planning stages of the application. He works through the features he wants the blog to have and some of the external libraries he's going to rely on (things like PHPUnit and jQuery). His goal for the series and the application is to have something he can replace his current blog with and to provide readers a step by step detail of the progress along the way.