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.