In this new post Jani Hartikainen shows a quick and easy method for creating a custom form element in your Zend Framework application. His example is a custom time element.

The alternatives would be creating custom view helpers to output the custom form elements, and using the viewscript decorator. Creating a custom view helper would also require a custom form element class, and it would be a bit tricky. [...] I think the viewscript approach is the most flexible and simplest to implement, so I chose to go with that.

His example defines a time field made up of three drop down lists, one each for hours, minutes and seconds. Included is the code to make the element (including a regular expression for validation) and the view script to display it.