If you've ever wanted to have a form that stuck with every page of your Zend Framework application, Rob Allen might just have your solution in his latest blog post.

I recently received an email asking for my advice about how to handle a form that appears on every page. I want to add a newsletter sign up box to layout.phtml so it will appear on every page. The layout->content() comes from several different action controllers... So how do I handle the newsletter sign up? I thought that the answer is long-winded enough to be worth writing a blog post about. One way to do this is to use a action helper, so let's build a simple application to show this solution.

He walks you through the creation of the simplest part first - the form that will live inside of the view helper. He chose a signup type of form with a username, email and submit button. He helps you create an action helper and the view helpers to help inject the form into the layout of each page. Then, with a simple call to "$this->signupForm()" you can drop it in anywhere in the layout.