Chris Morrell

This just came up on #zftalk, and it appears that the information out there is either incomplete or incorrect, so I thought I’d just put out a simple solution.  Here’s a simple way to calculate the difference between two Zend_Date objects (in days):

$jan1 = new Zend_Date('1.12.2009', Zend_Date::DATES);
echo "\nJanuary first: ", $jan1->toString();

$christmas = new Zend_Date('25.12.2009', Zend_Date::DATES);
echo "\nChristmas is on: ", $christmas->toString();

$diff = $christmas->sub($jan1);
echo "\nNumber of days: ", $diff / 60 / 60 / 24;

I’ve been thinking a lot about Modeling in a MVC application, particularly in the Zend Framework. Obviously each application is different, and any Model is going to be fairly unique to your application. That’s why ZF doesn’t provide a base Model class. That said, there are some design patterns that a lot of people are using nowadays, and applications could use some base functionality to facilitate those patterns.

Zend Framework’s project lead, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, has a lot of great thoughts about Modeling that I’ve been trying to stick to. In implementing those ideas, I’ve started thinking out some base classes to build my Models on top of. Obviously these classes won’t work for everyone. But they should work for a lot of “typical” web applications.

Continue reading “PHP Modeling (in Zend Framework)” »

For some reason this took me a long time to figure out, so I thought I’d post it in case other people are having similar problems.  I wanted www.mysite.com to route to the www module and app.mysite.com to route to the app module.  In the end it was quite simple—I was trying to make it much more complicated than it needed to.

I’m using Zend Framework 1.8.4 with Zend_Application

Here’s my router configuration:

resources.router.routes.www.type = "Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Hostname"
resources.router.routes.www.route = ":module.mysite.com"
resources.router.routes.www.defaults.module = "www"
resources.router.routes.www.chains.index.type = "Zend_Controller_Router_Route"
resources.router.routes.www.chains.index.route = ":controller/:action/*"
resources.router.routes.www.chains.index.defaults.controller = "index"
resources.router.routes.www.chains.index.defaults.action = "index"

And here’s my .htaccess rule that redirect to www if another subdomain is used (or no subdomain is given):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|app)\.mysite\.(com|local)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.%2/$1 [R=302,QSA,L]

Otherwise it’s just your standard modular structure generated with the zf tool.

This post is mostly a reminder to myself, but I thought I’d put it out there just in case other people wanted some help:

Installing Zend Server CE

If Zend Server is already installed, you need to remove it:

• For older versions of Zend Server:
  1. Run /Applications/ZendServer/bin/zendctl.sh stop
  2. Remove /etc/zce.rc
  3. Double-check that no instances are running (you can use ps ax|grep -i zend)
• For newer versions of Zend Server
  1. Run /usr/local/zend/bin/uninstall.sh

Now download the latest version of the Zend Server CE Installer and run the installer

Link the CLI binary so you can use PHP from the command line:

• sudo ln -s /usr/local/zend/bin/php-cli /usr/bin/php
• Please note that this step is optional

Installing the Zend Framework

Now download the latest version of the Zend Framework

Unzip and copy the following files:

• library/Zend to /usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/library/Zend
• extras/library/ZendX to /usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/library/ZendX
• bin to /usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/bin
• Please note that if you don’t need the zf command line tool, and the version of the Zend Framework that came with Zend Server is up-to-date, these steps are unnecessary

Finally, link the zf.sh file so you can access it easily:

• sudo ln -s /usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/bin/zf.sh /usr/bin/zf

That’s it for now.  Hope that helps someone else out.