Zend Framework

[Daniel Lawson]

Hey everyone,

We're doing a little development using the Zend Framework and I was curious to see if anyone else has been making use of it in the edu arena.

We have a CMS (RedDot) that really eliminates the need for MVC, but we've made pretty good use of the filtering, validation, and authentication. It's looking like the database abstraction layer using PDO might be something we can use in the next coming months as well.

I'd also be interested to find some more resources, like tutorials, so if you've found something especially helpful (aside from the Zend documentation), please share.

I'll start off by sharing what we've found helpful:

Andries Seutens - Modern Web Development
Kevin Vaughan
Naneau
IBM: Understanding the Zend Framework
Ekini Web Dev Blog
Zend Framework Webinars

[Kevin Daum]

Would I be correct in thinking that the Zend Framework would replace Smarty? If that's correct, is Zend clearly better than Smarty or is it an "it depends" thing?

[Daniel Lawson]

I guess I kind of forgot one of the more important links, the Zend Reference pages: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/

Kevin, no, there would still be a great use for Smarty with the Zend Framework. I happened to find a great article about Smarty on the Zend Developer site: http://devzone.zend.com/article/1238-PHP-Templating-with-Smarty

If you were to use Model-View-Control in your project, it could possibly eliminate a need for templating with Smarty, I guess, but that's kind of our situation with a CMS anyways since that's the level where our templates are managed.

Zend Framework does many different things and you can use as much or as little of it as you need. There are even some incredible APIs available in it for using services from Akismet, Amazon, Audioscrobbler, Delicious, Flickr, Simpy, SlideShare, StrikeIron, Technorati, and Yahoo.

[Richard Orelup]

I'm not much of a frameworks guy, but PDO is nice for DB abstraction and will be using it more often in future new projects.

[Brian Steere]

I've used bits and pieces of it as I find them useful. The main piece I use the the Google Apps provisioning library as we have just started moving students to GAFYD. The library has made things much easier to setup and manage.

[Kevin Daum]

We are also considering moving students (and staff) to GAFYD. Are you moving only students or staff as well? Have you thought about calendars? I'd be interested to know what you've done with it already and what you're planning for the future.

[Brian Steere]

Currently we are only moving students. I know we had reasons for doing that, but at the moment I can't remember what they were. Students don't really use our calendaring system for the most part, so moving them wasn't a problem. Also, Outlook and Google Calendar can send meeting requests back and forth...they just can't see free/busy times.

[Rich Harrington]

We're (Saint Xavier - Chicago) moving 'em as we speak. Or click, whatever.
I'm using the Zend GApps API pretty extensively, I hope well...

We're baby-stepping thru the rollout with GMail as the first deliverable but I think that unless there's some kind of outcry we'll find a way to use a LOT of the GApps in an 'official' capacity.