PHP, Zend Framework and Other Crazy Stuff
Archive for December, 2007
Getting tired of Home? Emmigrate to PHP City in Jamaica!
Dec 20th
Yes, Cal Evans has setup the paradise of PHP City on the island of Jamaica. Granted, it’s a Flash version of Jamaica, but Jamaica all the same. Haven’t you ever wanted to visit Jamaica??? Then do it now!
If you really want to lend a hand, then visit this link everyday so we can overtake all the other piddly little settlements in Jamaica (like Rastafarie) and continue on to overpopulate the entire island. Commune with fellow PHP City citizens like Mayor McCal (our revered leader) or everyone else who commutes to PHP City daily (it has a 0 rate of Criminality, and 0 Unemployment!).
If you want to really help out, also visit the following:
http://phpcity.myminicity.com/ind (Get yourself a job and build up PHP City’s industry!)
http://phpcity.myminicity.com/tra (Let’s get the Transporation sector up to scratch!)
http://phpcity.myminicity.com/sec (Whip out a BFG and fight crime!)
http://phpcity.myminicity.com/env (Save the environment and tell Bush where to stick it!)
…more links to click with fervour when the City’s population increases more.
As a really simple click-daily web game, the core concept of MyMiniCity.com is quite good. It’s a simple ranking system relying on the obsessive visiting of URLs daily to increase the score of your adopted City. As I’ve seen before, it’s the simple things leading to a little pride, achievement and sense of superiority that are weirdly attractive to people. No doubt this simple flash game gets a surprising number of visitors who, attracted first by the simple concept of growing a Mini City, are then diverted to the other stable of games advertised on the site.
But, hey, we’re talking Jamaica – don’t disappoint Mayor McCal. If you do, some polite gentlemen may drop by, strap you to a chair, and force you to memorise all those PHP functions everyone relies on the manual to recall. Do you want that? I wouldn’t.
Complex Views with the Zend Framework – The Final Chapter: ZFE and Zend_Layout released to Core!
Dec 19th
As announced earlier by Matthew Weier O’Phinney the Zend_View Enhanced and Zend_Layout components have migrated to the Zend Framework Core.
These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View. Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.
Those following the long running “Complex Views With The Zend Framework” series on this blog will be overjoyed to see the adoption of partials, placeholders and controller actions that I discussed at the time. All of which were explored in general terms before being combined into the Zend_View Enhanced proposal. Ralph Schindler’s Zend_Layout solution (the one I had many a disagreement over 
) has also made Core which resolves any layout aggregation issues that are hugely troublesome otherwise.
I’d like to thank Matthew and Ralph who did most of the coding and committing for this one. I was unfortunately tied up to a tree called “Life” after the Summer and unable to contribute in any remarkable detail except by providing the odd remark and cutting criticism when the mood took me . I can be a harsh complainer at times! Great job from both you guys!
While I sit here staring at some C code wondering if windows.h is the devil, I hope users of the Zend Framework will quickly adopt and try out these Cored components. They reduce the solutions to very common and concrete problems with composing a View to a simple API that’s easy to learn, and easy to apply. If you are still using older versions of either component, there’s no time like January 7 (let’s let you have the Christmas and New Year ) to migrate.
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