In this new post to his blog Rob Allen looks at how to use a standard installation of the Zend Framework on a shared hosting environment.

When you deploy a Zend Framework website to a shared host, you usually cannot change the DocumentRoot to point at the public/ folder of the website. As a result the URL to the website is now http://www.example.com/public/. This doesn't look very professional, so we'd like to remove it. The easiest way, given a ZF project created using Zend_Tool.

In the index.php file you'll need to define a constant and an .htaccess file to route everything back to that index. You'll need to be aware of this change when working with files and can check in the front controller for that constant to reset the base path if needed (code example included).