Indeed it is really strange to see all SQL, HTML and PHP all in one file?! This is like end of ’90s! That’s for sure a bad approach.

I’ll download the 1.5 version with the hope the code there will be better!

I’ve decided to write a quick tutorial about the way I work with Zend Framework. The problems I have, and the way I get through their solution. I think it will be useful for anyone common with the OOP design patterns and PHP programming, who wants to start with Zend Framework.

Introduction

In my practice as programmer I’ve noticed, that almost 90% of the sites we’ve build, have the same problems to solve and similar milestones.

At first why we need a framework? Because most of the programmers start from the beginning with the design of abstraction layers, and the time for the design is absolutely wasted when there are already that kind of abstraction given from almost every framework. Many of them have a big community of programmers around and cover a large scale of programming issues.

The obvious conclusion here is that there are not much sense in loosing that time. In the other part learning and using a framework with the scale of Zend Framework also requires a lot of time, but there’s no need of learning every part of it before you really start. That can happen later on.

That’s what happened in my case. Before two years I’ve designed and build my own framework, which does a lot of good work to organize the working process in the company I worked than. Than I start using a content management systems (CMS), mainly Joomla!, but recently noticed, that our clients don’t need that many functionality as Joomla! offers. They did not create a “menu” or add “template”.

With the idea to create web systems with my own CMS I decided to use Zend Framework. Not just like that, but mostely because the other PHP frameworks like CakePHP or Symfony looked to me more like CMS, something that I don’t want, because I’d like to build my own steping on the base of framework which gives those abstraction layers like db connection, acl etc.

With this tutorial I’ll describe the path I passed trough using the Zend Framework, and how it can be basicaly used.

part 2 – directory layout and bootstrapping