In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes talks about some fund he had with custom Zend_Views in developing a fantasy gaming platform.

I managed to figure out that one requirement was for an admin to upload a header and footer file for a game. "The idea here is to be able to set up a new game for someone without programmer intervention". After I got over being insulted that a programmer was not required for every tiny tweak to the site (I'm kidding) I tried to figure out how I was going to accomplish this. I'm not a big fan of storing actual HTML content in a database.

He figured out that a set of custom Zend_View components were just what was needed - they could override the content that was out there and pull in the dynamic needs from database records. He includes both his test for the class (trying out TDD) and the code for the custom view. He also shares a few "gotcha" sort of things that he learned in the process.