Chris Abernethy . com

Recently I started working with Zend Framework's Zend_Form and its integrated automatic translation functionality using Zend_Translate. In general, the functionality is really great, but if you have ever tried to translate all of the possible validation error messages, you know that finding them can be a long manual task. Naturally, I brought this up on #zftalk, and the consensus seemed to be that the translatable messages could be extracted using a little PHP and ReflectionClass magic.

Hanging out in #zftalk on freenode is a great way to learn more about using Zend Framework, if you're not already there get yourself an IRC client and sign on. Recently, the following question was posed:

How can I create a route with an optional parameter; e.g /search/:foo/:bar, where :bar is optional? Do I need to create two different routes?

Several users correctly suggested specifying a default value for :bar when constructing the route, and it was also mentioned that both standard routes and regular expression routes could be used to solve the problem. Naturally, this lead to a discussion of which type of route would be fastest, with no real numbers to fall back on.

Migrating an existing PHP application to Zend Framework can be a daunting task, especially if the migration must occur all at once. It is much easier to migrate the application in sections over a longer period of time. This approach requires some modification from a normal Zend Framework setup

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I've just finished watching some of the archived webinars related to Zend Framework over at Zend.com, and found some great information about rendering view output into a sitewide template in the MVC applications with Zend Framework webinar.

Since I'm currently developing a website with multiple modules, each having their own distinct look, I'd like to extend the examples provided in the webinar to allow specifying per-module templates. Here is what I came up with: