This second, and concluding, segment of the Dwoo article explores some of Dwoo’s lesser-known features: sub-templates, template inheritance, output caching, custom plugins and filters, and Zend Framework integration.

Full design control usually means large, thousand plus line CSS files that equal serious pain when it comes to maintenance or building upon. If you don’t namespace your selectors carefully you’ll end up paying for it down the road. And heaven forbid you apply a default HTML tag styling. So, ranting aside, how do you maintain flexibility and still keep tidy CSS and JavaScript? My solution is to keep the very same directory/file structure that is used for the application for my CSS and JavaScript. The best part is by writing a very simple view helper, it’s super easy to automate the proper head link and script file inclusions.

Views in MVC are allowed to communicate with the Model (using read-only
operations), and are allowed to perform display-related logic. That said,
how do you actually access the model? And what if you have some fairly
complex logic that you may need to repeat, or which you may not want to
display directly in the view in order to keep it clean and easy to read?
In Zend Framework, the answer is to use View Helpers.

One of my roles at Zend is as a Zend Framework developer, and as such, I’m
the lead developer on the MVC components. Yesterday, I committed a change to
core in preparation for the 1.0.0RC1 release that, while breaking backwards
compatability slightly, will also greatly simplify the integration between
the controller and view components.

p. Padraic Brady has been posting a fascinating series of articles on his blog about complex views in the Zend Framework. If you are working with the Zend Framework or you are interested in a deep discussion about M-V-C then you’ll want to spend a lunch hour digesting these four articles.

p. Ben Ramsey has been working with the Zend Framework lately and has posted his notes on some new functionality in Zend_View for all to share.

p. ! Jason Gilmore, Editorial Director for Apress Open Source and author of three books, shows you how you too can track his book’s popularity on Amazon. Ok so he also shows you how he used the Zend Framework to build his mashup too.