Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

As a continuing part of my MVC series, I've posted a new article on Form Decorators up on the DevZone.

I'm hoping this will be the definitive guide to using form decorators. I cover the design decisions behind them, basics of operation, how to customize output by mixing and matching standard decorators, and how to create your own custom decorators. Among the examples are how to create a table-based layout for your forms (instead of the dynamic list layout used by default), and how to use a View Script as your form decorator in order to have full control over your form layout.

So, if you've been playing with Zend_Form and having trouble wrapping your head around decorators, give it a read!

With 1.0 and 1.5 of Zend Framework now released, there are a lot of questions flying around -- what will we do next, what components to expect, what are some of the best practices, etc. So, we're going to have an open Question and Answer Session webinar, with all of us on the internal team.

If you have a question you want answered, please be kind enough to submit your question in advance, so we have time to actually think about it (though you can always broadside us during the webinar).

Sign up in advance so you don't miss out!

I have another tutorial in my Zend Framework MVC series up on DevZone today, this time on View Helpers. If you're curious on how to create view helpers, override the standard view helpers, or how some of the standard view helpers such as partials and placeholders work, give it a read!

I'm doing a series of articles on various Zend Framework MVC topics for the Zend Developer Zone. Last week, I covered Action Helpers. This week, I cover Front Controller Plugins. If you've ever been mystified by or curious about this subject, head on over and give it a read!

I've posted a new article on Action Helpers in Zend Framework's MVC on the Zend Developer Zone. If you've ever wanted more information on these, follow the link.

Somebody on Twitter pointed this out, and I thought I'd spread the word: DHH of Rails fame has posted a nice, short, and very interesting thought on "The immediacy of PHP".

I've been delving a little into Rails lately myself, and what I find is: use the right tool for the job. For green-field, self-hosted projects, Rails is not a bad choice, and offers a very easy way to get your application up and running quickly. But due to the fact that PHP was built for the web, there are any number of tasks that are simpler and faster to accomplish using it. Evaluate your needs carefully, and choose the tool that best addresses them.

It's nice to see leaders of projects like Rails having this same attitude. It's a breath of fresh air in the competitive market of web development frameworks.

Cal has released a new PHP Abstract podcast today on the Zend Developer Zone, an interview with Wil Sinclair, the project manager for Zend Framework, and Brad Cottel, Zend's product Evangelist. In it, they talk quite a bit about the work I've done on Zend Form, and also a lot about the proposal process.

If you're interested in the new 1.5 features, or how the proposal process works and who contributes to the community, give it a listen!

Dojo announced today the availability of 1.1.0.

I've been toying with Dojo off-and-on for almost a year now. It's the most framework-y of the various JS toolkits I've tried, and I particularly appreciate its modularity. (That said, it can lead to a lot of HTTP requests to your site if you don't create a targetted bundle with the modules you need.)

The 1.1.0 release has me pretty excited, as it finally is doing something most other JS frameworks have been doing for some time: its XHR requests now send the "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" header, which allows it to conform to the isXmlHttpRequest() method in Zend Framework's request object. This makes it much easier to provide a standard mechanism in your server-side code for detecting AJAX requests, allowing context switching to be automated.

I've fielded a number of questions from people wanting to know how to handle authentication and identity persistence in Zend Framework. The typical issue is that they're unsure how to combine:

• An authentication adapter
• A login form
• A controller for login/logout actions
• Checking for an authenticated user in subsequent requests

It's not terribly difficult, but it does require knowing how the various pieces of the MVC fit together, and how to use Zend_Auth. Let's take a look.

I use Vim for all my editing needs -- TODO lists, email, presentation outlines, coding in any language... everything. So, I thought I'd start sharing some of my vim habits and tools with others, particularly those that pertain to using Vim with PHP.