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.

Tony Bibbs has posted a mini-case study about how, at his work, they cut their use of the Zend_Log component of the Zend Framework in half:

As part of the framework we use at work, we borrow what we feel are the best components out there and logging is a key part of that. Logging should be simple to setup, easy to use and should minimize work on the developer. After all, you are going to do a lot of logging, right?

He shows how, with a few changes to how they log (creation of a custom logger), it reduces the number of calls to load a Zend_Registry object each time something needs to be recorded. His code is included in the post along with examples of it in action.

On the KillerPHP.com website, there's this new post starting off a new series (by Jonathan Lebensold) talking about the different components of the Zend Framework.

When Stefan asked me to write about the Zend Framework, I decided I would avoid copy-able code, simply because it doesn't re-enforce good software design. [...] The following is a brief summary of 4 components in the Zend Framework: Zend_Loader, Zend_Log, Zend_Config and Zend_Registry.

For each of the four components, he looks at how they can be used (reason why), some good and bad things about them and he includes some pseudocode to show the format for its use.