On the Developer Tutorials site there's a new tutorial providing an introduction to the popular PHP framework, the Zend Framework.

I find myself constantly bombarded with questions from students and co-workers I've introduced to the Zend Framework regarding how the different components can come together to form a basic application. I've searched, I have found, I have emailed great tutorials, but still the most common questions are posed "What's should I include in index.php?", "Should I use Zend_Db_Table?", "And what about Zend_Form?"

It gives the usual overview of setting up an application and how its all structured but it also includes a specific look at the Zend_Form, Zend_Db_Table, Zend_Registry and Zend_Cache components.

Ivan Iordanov has posted a method he's come up with to extend the existing Zend_Db_Table functionality (of the Zend Framework) to create NestedSet models for your app.

Last days I've been trying to customize Zend's Framework. My goal is to create simpler models. Currently I'm making some db models that handle stuff around wide used designs. Such design is the Nested Set model. It is an adjacent list realized in SQL as a tree. You can find a good introduction to nested sets at mysql developer zone.

He steps through the creation of some example database tables, his class and controller to hook into the Zend Framework application and this full code for his interface class to make the NestedSet models easy.