This post tells a story.

A long time ago, I set out to write my own blog platform. Yes, WordPress is a fine blogging platform, as is Serendipity (aka "s9y", and my previous platform). And yes, I know about Habari. And, for those of you skimming ahead, yes, I'm quite aware of Jekyll, thank you anyways.

Why write something of my own? Well, of course, there's the fact that I'm a developer, and have control issues. Then there's also the fact that a blog is both a simple enough domain to allow easily experimenting with new technology and paradigms, while simultaneously providing a complex enough domain to expose non-trivial issues.

When I started this project, it was a technology-centered endeavor; I wanted to play with document databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB, and with caching technologies like memcached and redis.

Not long after I started, I also realized it was a great playground for me to prototype ideas for ZF2; in fact, the original DI and MVC prototypes lived as branches of my blog. (My repository is still named "zf2sandbox" to this day, though it technically houses just my site.)

Over time, I had a few realizations. First, my actual blog was suffering. I wasn't taking the time to perform security updates, nor even normal upgrades, and was so far behind as to make the process non-trivial, particularly as I had a custom theme, and because I was proxying to my blog via a ZF app in order to facilitate a cohesive site look-and-feel. I needed to either sink time into upgrading, or finish my blog.

My second realization, however, was the more important one: I wanted a platform where I could write how I want to write. I am a keyboard-centric developer and computer user, and while I love the web, I hate typing in its forms. Additionally, my posts often take longer than a typical browser session — which leaves me either losing my work in a GUI admin, or having to write first in my editor of choice, and then cut-and-paste it to the web forms. Finally, I want versions I can easily browse with standard diffing tools.

When it came down to it, my blog content is basically static. Occasionally, I'll update a post, but it's rare. Comments are really the only dynamic aspect of the blog… and what I had with s9y was not cutting it, as I was getting more spam than I could keep up with. New commenting platforms such as Livefyre and Disqus provide more features than most blogging platforms I know, and provide another side benefit: because they are javascript-based, you can simply drop in a small amount of markup into your post once — meaning your pages can be fully static!

Add these thoughts to the rise of static blogging platforms such as the aforementioned Jekyll, and I had a kernel of an idea: take the work I'd done already, and create a static blog generator.

Late last week, the Zend Framework community released 2.0.0beta3, the latest iteration of the v2 framework. What have we been busy doing the last couple months? In a nutshell, getting dirty with view layers, database abstraction, and configuration.

One key new architectural feature of Zend Framework 2 is its new module infrastructure. The basic idea behind modules is to allow developers to both create and consume re-usable application functionality — anything from packaging common assets such as CSS and JavaScript to providing MVC application classes.

I don't often get political on my blog, or over social media. But those of you who follow me on twitter lately have been treated to a number of tweets and retweets from me about some bills before the US legislative bodies called "SOPA" and "PIPA". Over the last couple days, I realized exactly why I disagree with them, and felt 140 characters is not enough.

When I started teaching myself scripting languages, I started with Perl. One Perl motto is "TMTOWTDI" — "There's More Than One Way To Do It," and pronounced "tim-toady." The idea is that there's likely multiple ways to accomplish the very same thing, and the culture of the language encourages finding novel ways to do things.

I've seen this principle used everywhere and in just about every programming situation possible, applied to logical operations, naming conventions, formatting, and even project structure. Everyone has an opinion on these topics, and given free rein to implement as they see fit, it's rare that two developers will come up with the same conventions.

TMTOWTDI is an incredibly freeing and egalitarian principle.

Over the years, however, my love for TMTOWTDI has diminished some. Freeing as it is, is also a driving force behind having coding standards and conventions — because when everyone does it their own way, projects become quickly hard to maintain. Each person finds themselves reformatting code to their own standards, simply so they can read it and follow its flow.

Additionally, TMTOWTDI can actually be a foe of simple, elegant solutions.

Why do I claim this?

The error suppression operator in PHP (@) is often seen as a necessary evil. Many, many low-level function will return a value indicating an error, but also raise an E_NOTICE or E_WARNING — things you might be able to recover from, or conditions where you may want to raise an exception.

So, at times, you find yourself writing code like this:

if (false === ($fh = @fopen($filename, 'r'))) {
    throw new RuntimeException(sprintf(
        'Could not open file "%s" to read', $filename
    ));
}

Seems straight-forward enough, right? But it's wrong on so many levels.

During ZendCon this year, we released 2.0.0beta1 of Zend Framework. The key story in the release is the creation of a new MVC layer, and to sweeten the story, the addition of a modular application architecture.

"Modular? What's that mean?" For ZF2, "modular" means that your application is built of one or more "modules". In a lexicon agreed upon during our IRC meetings, a module is a collection of code and other files that solves a specific atomic problem of the application or website.

As an example, consider a typical corporate website in a technical arena. You might have:

• A home page
• Product and other marketing pages
• Some forums
• A corporate blog
• A knowledge base/FAQ area
• Contact forms

These can be divided into discrete modules:

• A "pages" modules for the home page, product, and marketing pages
• A "forum" module
• A "blog" module
• An "faq" or "kb" module
• A "contact" module

Furthermore, if these are developed well and discretely, they can be re-used between different applications!

So, let's dive into ZF2 modules!

Earlier this year, I wrote about Aspects, Intercepting Filters, Signal Slots, and Events, in order to compare these similar approaches to handling both asychronous programming as well as handling cross-cutting application concerns in a cohesive way.

I took the research I did for that article, and applied it to what was then a "SignalSlot" implementation within Zend Framework 2, and refactored that work into a new "EventManager" component. This article is intended to get you up and running with it.

Until a few years ago, there were basically two tools you could use to generate API documentation in PHP: phpDocumentor and Doxygen. phpDocumentor was long considered the standard, with Doxygen getting notice when more advanced features such as inheritance diagrams are required. However, phpDocumentor is practically unsupported at this time (though a small group of developers is working on a new version), and Doxygen has never had PHP as its primary concern. As such, a number of new projects are starting to emerge as replacements.

One of these is DocBlox. I am well aware there are several others — and indeed, I've tried several of them. This post is not here to debate the merits or demerits of this or other solutions; the intention is to introduce you to DocBlox so that you can evaluate it yourself.

Within the Zend Framework 2 repository, I recently performed a conversion from DocBook 4 to 5. The latter is a more modern version of the toolchain, and offers a somewhat simpler syntax and workflow. For example, you no longer need to track how many levels deep you are in your chapter sections — you simply use a <section> tag. One of the nicer changes is that you do not need to specify a doctype any more; you simply declare XML namespaces on your root elements and continue merrily on your way. This actually allows us to remove some actions in our build process, and makes validation much simpler.

Interestingly, for DocBook5 being available in beta since 2005 and an official standard since 2009, there is very little material on migrating from DocBook 4 to 5.