On PHPBuilder.com there’s a new tutorial on layouts in Zend Framework applications. The tools the framework gives you makes things much simpler when it comes to changing layouts and updating the general structure of your site.

If you use Zend Framework you probably used the initRoutes() function in your Initializer.php to create nice URI’s and creating some different routing in your application. To create a customized route for your application you can use the Zend_Controller_Router_Route class from the Zend Framework. If you use the common syntax you have to repeatedly build routes in code for all routes in your application. This makes it not maintainable for programmers. To fix this problem we are going to use a XML file with all routing information.

Working with an off-the-shelf shopping cart usually requires a little bit of patience. Scaling an e-commerce site does have its share of problems. There is a LOT of interactivity that needs to be implemented. This can be things along the lines of generating targeted ads, sending email or charging a credit card.

To charge a credit card, the ecommerce software will usually take the credit card information from the end user, put it into some form of web service request and the request is submitted to a remote system. While that web service request is taking place the process handling PHP is unable to take additional require requests to serve regular pages.

Building an enterprise-grade application with PHP and Oracle, but can’t figure out how to get the two of them talking? There’s an easy solution: Zend Server 5.0 comes with a modern, secure PHP stack that includes OCI8 support out of the box. Toss in support for Oracle connection pooling, rule-based page caching and industrial-strength code tracing and profiling, and you’re ready to play with the big boys!

New from ZendCasts.com today there’s a screencast posted showing you how to integrate Zend_Tool into your application, allowing it to be easily used from the command-line.

Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his blog today looking a a method for doing some context switching in his Zend Framework application to use jQuery in his app’s static HTML output.

With several articles out there about sharing session across multiple servers on databases, there seemed to be a lack of examples that used SQL Server to do it. Enrico Zimuel has helped to solve that problem with his new post on using Zend Server and SQL Server to persist the session data.

In a new article from php|architect Joel Clermont shares a few helpful hints on what he did to help prepare for the Zend Framework Certification Exam.

New from ZendCasts.com there’s a screencast that will help you ajaxify your Zend_Form instance with the help of jQuery.

On PHPBuilder.com today there’s a new article by Jason Gilmore about how you can use the Zend_Gdata component of the Zend Framework to work with the information stored in Google’s “Books” web services.