Free Zend Framework Screencasts - Zendcasts

This little video tutorial should set you up for building your own custom Zend_Form decorators in 15 minutes. I’ll show you how you can make the necessary class and have it easily added to your existing Zend_Form_Decorator configuration.

Grab a copy of the project or browse the repository.

In other news, ServerGrove is giving Zendcast viewers a coupon! ServerGrove specializes in Zend Framework hosting and they’ve offered a 10% rebate on hosting with coupon code “zc”. If you’re looking for a host, be sure to check them out (referral). They’ve also added an additional coupon for “Mini Hosting” plans, get $2 off by using code “zcmini”.
 

One of the pain points for folks who are starting to work with the Zend Framework is the Decorating functionality found in the depths of Zend_Form. I’ve witnessed countless instances when a developer becomes excited by Zend_Form’s easy-to-implement form validation and creation, only to become frustrated by countless hours of fighting with Zend_Form_Decorators. This video is a humble attempt on my part to walk through how Zend_Form Decorators work and how you can reason your way through a desire result. I couldn’t have gotten my own head around this implementation of the decorator pattern without Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s excellent posts and his original devzone article.

UPDATE: check out this blog post / tutorial for ZF 1.10.0: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/learning.form.decorators.html

I’ll show you a bit about how Zend_Form_Decorators are constructed and how to take the default zend_form layout and transform it into a table.

Grab a copy of the project or browse the repository.

ServerGrove is giving Zendcast viewers a coupon! ServerGrove specializes in Zend Framework hosting and they’ve offered a 10% rebate on hosting with coupon code “zc”. If you’re looking for a host, be sure to check them out (referral). They’ve also added an additional coupon for “Mini Hosting” plans, get $2 off by using code “zcmini”.
 

This is part 2 in a series on many to many with Zend_Form and Zend_Db. I suggest starting with last week’s video on Zend_Db and many-to-many in order to follow the configuration of our models. Grab the code and follow along! This concludes this series on Zend_Db. I’ve also uploaded a zipped version of the code if that’s easier than Google Code.

Exposing many-to-many in a practical application took a little more time and effort than I had anticipated. With that in mind, I to use this opportunity to explore how Zend_Form, Zend_Controller and Zend_Db could be integrated. This is the first in a two part set looking at our data model.

By the end of the second video, you should have a project that explores the following concepts with Zend_Db:

• A user has many tasks (many-to-many)
• A task has many users (many-to-many)
• A user has one contact type (one-to-many)
• A contact type has many users (many-to-one)

Unfortunately, this only gets through setting up the database, CRUD with Tasks and setting up the Many-to-Many classes in Zend_Db. The next video will cover how we can write a Zend_Form that will map the associations between the users and tasks. Enjoy!

If you can’t wait till the next video, grab the code on google code and play with it firsthand.