As Cal Evans points out on the Zend Developer Zone today, Maurice Fonk has created a nice little tutorial on using the Smarty templating system to help manage the output of a Zend Framework application.

When I started using the Zend Framework a while ago now, I read this article on the zend developer zone. While it describes a decent implementation, I have some problems with it.

[...] So I decided to come up with my own implementation. It follows Zend_View as closely as possible, while still retaining standard Smarty behavior. That means that I have overwritten as little as possible, and added nothing.

In his method, he's created a protected _run() function that, given the template to use by the Zend_View object for the page, goes and fetches it and renders the page. He includes an example to show how it would work in a more "real life" situation.