Actually this is really a common task to do. You’ve to rewrite the url to be more “user friendly”. To be more clear I’ll give you an example. Let’s imagine you have a index controller and an index action. Thus if you have to load an Id from the database at least with the build in Zend Framework capabilities, you’ve to use this link:

www.example.com/index/index/id/33949

This is not good. It’s really bad. It will be great if you can use something like this:

www.example.com/33949

The solution in Zend Framework is called Zend_Controller_Router_Route. In a short snippet this will look like so:

$frontController->addRoute("my-route", new Zend_Controller_Router_Route("/:id",
    array("controller" => "index", "action" => "index", 'id' => 1),
    array('id' => '\d+')));

Here as you can see id is set to be 1. But don’t worry that’s not a hard code. The real work is done by the last parameter where the id is matched against a number value. Thus www.example.com/3 will be OK, but www.example.com/3a won’t.

Important Note

Don’t forget to add this rewrite rule in the .htaccess file.

A typical web developer knows exactly how a PHP if statement looks like:

   if ( expression ) {
      // if the expression was true proceed here
   } else {
      // there was a false expression
  }

HTML mess with PHP

When it comes to merge PHP and HTML the things are becoming ugly. Indeed most of the template systems as Smarty are improved and developed to overcome this issue, however when working with a native PHP code with no template system or with template system where the PHP code is allowed the things are really bad.

Let me show this in a breve example. Image you have to show different formatted HTML depending on a PHP expression. Something like that

OK. Your registration is successful

Something went wrong! Please try again later! 

Now you can see how difficult to maintain this code is when it doesn’t make use of only one code of HTML markup. Imaging you’ve to print differently formatted tables! Indeed the PHP curly brackets are different to follow.

PHP: the different IF syntax

So there is a PHP syntax that tries to help you manage this. You can write more human readable code like this:

message goes here

Thus you get the ENDIF instead of only one curly bracket. That’s indeed readable enough. In fact you can use this syntax with any conditional or loop statement in PHP:

 $val) : ?>

To return in the previous example the code above should be transformed in that:

some message here!

some error here!