Ashley Etchell

Today I decided to get my ass in gear and update my rather flagging skillset. Ive been meaning to pick up PHP/MySQL 5 for about 3 years now but family activities, the day job and an embarressing amount of time spent playing online games just seemed to get in the way. Well, today enough was enough, I purchased a bunch of reference books on PHP 5 and MySQL 5 a few months ago but did nothing other than read over the changes from previous versions. I’ve been fully aware of the changes between the versions for some time, but never really put my knowledge into practice.

 Armed with a little bit of knowledge (a dangerous thing?)  of what is involved I set about the task of choosing a new framework. I’ve been a fan of PEAR and Smarty for some years but I’m coming to the conclusion that while they are perfectly good libraries of code, they are quite old now and don’t do a great deal in encouraging me to further my skills.

 I’ve been keeping my eye on the Zend framework since it was announced a couple of years ago or so and it didnt take me long to decide that this would be my new framework of choice. Now at version 1.5.x, Zend’s framework (ZF) has a lot of attractive features available which will take the drudgery out of creating applications for the web and the form classes make me salivate with excitement.

After an initial look at the framework and some of the tutorials available (which are not that great to be honest) I am confident that this framework will push PEAR/Smarty out of the way pretty soon! You can even integrate Smarty into ZF with little fuss and override its default views.

I must say, the Zend ‘official’ quick start tutorial is pretty bad, even enough to put a lot of people off using the ZF, although some slightly better tutorials exist, they still lack some key information and pointers on how to perform some basic tasks. So i will construct my own tutorial in the next few days showing you how to create a basic skeleton for a site using ZF and maybe Smarty (I do love smarty). My tutorial will show you how to create modules and controllers, taking into account some basic URL formatting and keep everything nice and tidy.