Zend Framework Invades Ning! PHPCommunity Dips It's Big Toe In the Ning Waters As Well.

First reported on his blog and then picked up by phpdeveloper.org was the news that Ben Ramsey spent the wee hours of the morning putting the Zend Framework up on Ning. I caught up with Ben on irc.freenode.net’s #phpc channel and asked him the question I know each of you is wondering. Why? Here’s his response.

Well, originally, I had cloned the basic “Review It!” app and started playing around with it and seeing how things worked. I noticed that “Review It!” contained it’s own light-weight controller and I also noticed that Ning allows URL Mappings similar to Apache’s mod_rewrite, so I hacked it around to use “friendly” URLs for “Review It!” Then, I wanted to use some components of the Zend Framework (namely Zend_Filter), so I started uploading small pieces of the Zend Framework while continuing to use the controller that came with “Review It!” I soon decided, though, that the controller that came with the app was fairly limited and the paths were all hard-coded, so I decided to use the Zend Framework controller instead.

Ben gives all the details on what changes he had to make to get things to work with the Zend Framework on Ning. He also offers some important tips like there is no MySQL or PostgreSQL on Ning. All is not lost however, Ben has thought of that and advises uses to use the Ning Content Store. You can read all of this and much more on the Zend Framework Ning site. You can even clone it and start building your own application.

Sensing that I didn’t have enough for a story, I decided to ask him about the overnight move of PHPCommunity to Ning and whether it was related to his work on getting the Zend Framework setup on Ning. Here things got a little more verbose.

They weren’t exactly related, but I was playing with Ning at the time, and I saw the default Groups app that Ning provides, so I thought I’d give it a try. It didn’t take but five minutes to set up, most of which was spent grabbing the PHPC logo from phpcommunity.org and using the Adobe Photoshop color dropper to figure out the hex values of the colors I wanted to use. I showed it to Elizabeth Naramore, who liked it, and we decided to tell Ligaya Turmelle about it. Ligaya liked it, Aaron Wormus blogged it, and the rest is history. It wasn’t a decision to fill a need, but I’ve noticed the new topic in #phpc lately, and I thought we should have a site that reflects what our community has evolved into. That is: “phpc is a community site for people to get together and get to know one another. It is about community and friendship.” So, the drive for creating a Ning site is to move us away from providing resources to the community. There are plenty of sites for that. I think the idea of using Ning for phpcommunity.org is to provide a way to foster this community by developing friendships.

So if you are a member of phpcommunity.org, head on over to their new Ning app. If you’ve got irc and time to kill, pop in over at #phpc on irc.freenode.net and chat for a while.

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