The Jayson Minard continues his "Blueprint for PHP Applications" series on the Zend Developer Zend today in part two, a look at creating and setting up the "bootstrapper" file mentioned previously.

In Part 1 of this article I talked a lot about funneling. Sending every request to one PHP file that then controls the flow of the request into our application code. This one PHP file is called the "Bootstrapper" and deals with everything in common for every request our application receives. The bootstrapper can setup, configure and gift wrap everything that all pages have in common. It can make sure the include path is setup correctly, that the environment is configured correctly, all PHP settings are set, that common model objects are loaded, and that the front controller is invoked to begin your MVC processing.

If you setup the bootstrapper correctly your application code will be more manageable and consistent, along with being easier to write in the first place.

They focus on teh directory structure in this part, demonstrating the correct structure, how to set the .htaccess to coordinate with it, and the creation of a simple PHP file to handle all incoming requests.