In a new post Bertrand Mansion shows how he combined the versatility of the PEAR QuickForm2 package and the Bootstrap project from Twitter to quickly make a form using the project's styling (CSS).

I don't know about you, but for me building HTML Forms and styling HTML Forms are maybe the most boring things in web development. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to do things correctly. That's why tools like Twitter's Bootstrap and PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 can help with this part of our job. Wouldn't it be nice to have QuickForm2 generate a markup compatible with Bootstrap CSS, so that you could get a nice looking form without to much efforts? Well, that's what I plan to do here.

He starts by creating a simple QuickForm2 form with no renderers attached (no pre-defined styles) and a custom render callback that wraps the items in "div" tags with the correct styles. There's also a custom renderer included for grouping items with additional styling attached.

Steve Francia has posted a follow-up to his "On Symfony2" post to his blog today with an introduction to the framework that helps you get everything installed you'll need.

In a follow up to my popular post on Symfony2, the open source PHP framework we use at OpenSky, I'm providing an easy guide to getting started using Symfony2. This isn't your basic "Hello World", but a practical guide to beginning a project with Symfony2.

He walks you through bootstrapping a sample application, applying a fix those on OSX might need and creating the application using the symfony command line tool to build everything you'll need.

New on the Zend Developer Zone today is the latest podcast in their "ZendCon Sessions" series (as recorded at the Zend/PHP Conference 2010 in Santa Clara, CA). In this episode Hector Virgen talks about creating reusable bootstrap resources with the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework.

His talk introduces you to bootstrapping, shows how to get started with Zend_Tool and shares code and configuration details for using resources in your controllers.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to one of their feeds. The slides are also on Slideshare if you'd like to follow along.

In the latest post to his blog Rob Allen shows you how to create a custom View object for your Zend Framework application with the help of the Zend_Application component. It uses one of two ways to set up this custom view object - either in the bootstrap or as a custom resource.

Let's say that you want to use your own view object within your Zend Framework application. Creating the view object is easy enough in library/App/View.php along with adding the App_ namespace to the the autoloader in application.ini. All we need to now is get Zend_Application to bootstrap with our new view class. There are two ways of doing this: within Bootstrap.php or using a custom resource.

He includes the code to make it happen both ways - by adding an _initView method in the application's Bootstrap.php file or by creating a new class called App_Resource_View that overrides the getView() method that grabs the custom object.

In a recent post to his blog Tom Van Herreweghe shares his method for running Zend Framework modules from a phar file, a simple archiving method native to PHP that makes it simpler to group and package related files.

Using Zend Framework as an MVC application is probably the most common usage examples for Zend Framework. When you create such an MVC application, you will probably have heard about modules: reusable components of your application. [...] In my case, I usually just copy and paste the module from one base project into a new project. That's easy. But it would be cooler to package your module as a Phar file, and run that file instead.

He includes the code that can be dropped into your Zend Framework installation - MyLib_Application_Resource_Modules - that handles the bootstrapping of the phar files and executes the Boostrap.php file that it finds inside. He also points to this other article from Cal Evans about working with phar files in the Zend Framework.

Robert Basic has a quick new post to his blog today showing how to load custom module plugins in your Zend Framework application.

I was trying to load a Front Controller plugin which resides in app/modules/my_module/controllers/plugins/ and not in the '�usual'� lib/My_App/Plugin/. I want this plugin to be called in every request and I want the plugin file to be under it's '�parent'� module.

To solve the problem he added a path to the Zend_Application_Module_Autoloader as a resource and registered it in the front controller. He includes some code to show how it works - a simple bootstrap with two _init functions, one for the news autoloading and another for plugins.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney as a new post to his blog today looking at a few "do's" and "dont's" when it comes to working with module boostraps in your Zend Framework applications - an apparently somewhat confusing topic for several developers out there.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

He talks briefly about why module boostraps are run on every request (getting into some detail on Zend_Application), how you can properly set up your boostrapping process and how you can use plugins to initialize only the things you might need and, as he openly admits, that there's just not a really good way to handle this sort of module funcionality.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a recent post to his blog giving a quick introduction to the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework and how it can be used to create custom resources.

Zend_Application works in conjunction with Zend_Application_Bootstrap, which, as you might guess from its name, is what really does the bulk of the work for bootstrapping your application. It allows you to utilize plugin bootstrap resources, or define local bootstrap resources as class methods. [...] Additionally, Zend_Application_Bootstrap provides for dependency tracking (i.e., if one resource depends on another, you can ensure that that other resource will be executed first), and acts as a repository for initialized resources.

Matthew gets right into the code, looking at how to create a simple bootstrap (for the "zf" command line tool to make the project) and the contents of the application.ini file. From there he looks at creating resources - bits of code that can be executed as a part of your bootstrapping process. His example shows the implementation of "_initCurrency" and "_initRegistry" methods.

Continuing on from the first part of the series, Marc Plotz forges ahead in his development of a PHP MVC (Model/View/Controller) framework. This new article gives a more complete overview of how the entire framework is structured.

Unlike the previous part, I am not simply giving you the part of the framework that we discuss, but a much more complete version. You will need a MySQL database to run it on, and you will have to setup the connection in application/db.ini.php. My example should guide you. You should not have to do much else than create the database and connect to it.

You can grab the source here and follow along with the tutorial as it steps through bootstrapping and a registry that replaces a "super global" handling method that could cause trouble.

Cal Evans has posted a Zend Framework quickie for working with the bootstrap in your application.

I've been teaching a Zend Framework class this week and my students have been throwing all kinds of questions at me. Most recently, while we were discussing creating a Bootstrap class for an application a question came up about the _init* functions.

The documentation talks about the bootstrap loading those init functions, but it leaves out the order they're executed in. Cal did a bit of research and found that they're executed in the order they're created with one exception - if you specify one to run first in the bootstrap constructor.