As a continuing part of my MVC series, I've posted a new article on Form Decorators up on the DevZone.

I'm hoping this will be the definitive guide to using form decorators. I cover the design decisions behind them, basics of operation, how to customize output by mixing and matching standard decorators, and how to create your own custom decorators. Among the examples are how to create a table-based layout for your forms (instead of the dynamic list layout used by default), and how to use a View Script as your form decorator in order to have full control over your form layout.

So, if you've been playing with Zend_Form and having trouble wrapping your head around decorators, give it a read!

With 1.0 and 1.5 of Zend Framework now released, there are a lot of questions flying around -- what will we do next, what components to expect, what are some of the best practices, etc. So, we're going to have an open Question and Answer Session webinar, with all of us on the internal team.

If you have a question you want answered, please be kind enough to submit your question in advance, so we have time to actually think about it (though you can always broadside us during the webinar).

Sign up in advance so you don't miss out!

I have another tutorial in my Zend Framework MVC series up on DevZone today, this time on View Helpers. If you're curious on how to create view helpers, override the standard view helpers, or how some of the standard view helpers such as partials and placeholders work, give it a read!

I'm doing a series of articles on various Zend Framework MVC topics for the Zend Developer Zone. Last week, I covered Action Helpers. This week, I cover Front Controller Plugins. If you've ever been mystified by or curious about this subject, head on over and give it a read!

I've posted a new article on Action Helpers in Zend Framework's MVC on the Zend Developer Zone. If you've ever wanted more information on these, follow the link.

Cal has released a new PHP Abstract podcast today on the Zend Developer Zone, an interview with Wil Sinclair, the project manager for Zend Framework, and Brad Cottel, Zend's product Evangelist. In it, they talk quite a bit about the work I've done on Zend Form, and also a lot about the proposal process.

If you're interested in the new 1.5 features, or how the proposal process works and who contributes to the community, give it a listen!

Dojo announced today the availability of 1.1.0.

I've been toying with Dojo off-and-on for almost a year now. It's the most framework-y of the various JS toolkits I've tried, and I particularly appreciate its modularity. (That said, it can lead to a lot of HTTP requests to your site if you don't create a targetted bundle with the modules you need.)

The 1.1.0 release has me pretty excited, as it finally is doing something most other JS frameworks have been doing for some time: its XHR requests now send the "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" header, which allows it to conform to the isXmlHttpRequest() method in Zend Framework's request object. This makes it much easier to provide a standard mechanism in your server-side code for detecting AJAX requests, allowing context switching to be automated.

Update: this article is now available in French, courtesy of Frédéric Blanc.

I've fielded a number of questions from people wanting to know how to handle authentication and identity persistence in Zend Framework. The typical issue is that they're unsure how to combine:

• An authentication adapter
• A login form
• A controller for login/logout actions
• Checking for an authenticated user in subsequent requests

It's not terribly difficult, but it does require knowing how the various pieces of the MVC fit together, and how to use Zend_Auth. Let's take a look.

Somebody asked for some examples of how I use the headLink(), headScript(), and other placeholder helpers, so I thought I'd take a crack at that today.

First off, let's look at what these helpers do. Each are concrete instances of a placeholder. In Zend Framework, placeholders are used for a number of purposes:

• Doctype awareness
• Aggregation and formatting of aggregated content
• Capturing content
• Persistence of content between view scripts and layout scripts

Let's look at these in detail.

As many know, Zend Framework 1.5.0 is almost ready for release... heck, it might even be released by the time you read this. There are a ton of new features worth looking into, but I'll list some of my own favorites here - the ones I've been either working on or using.