Matthew Weier O'Phinney has put together a new post to his blog today about creating providers in Zend Framework applications (command-line tasks) using the Zend_Tool component.

During [a workshop at Symfony Live] workshop, Stefan demonstrated creating Symfony "tasks". These are classes that tie in to the Symfony command-line tooling -- basically allowing you to tie in to the CLI tool in order to create cronjobs, migration scripts, etc. Of course, Zend Framework has an analogue to Symfony tasks in the Zend_Tool component's "providers". In this post, I'll demonstrate how you can create a simple provider that will return the most recent entry from an RSS or Atom feed.

He shows how to create a sample provider - one that grabs data from two RSS feeds and outputs them - complete with code example, adding the provider someplace where Zend_Tool can find it and using the provider through the command-line "zf" tool.