Chapter 3. Building a website with Zend Framework

 

This chapter covers

  • Developing a large Zend Framework application
  • Building a maintainable Bootstrap class
  • Writing and testing database model classes

To show off the features of the framework in this chapter, we are going to build a community website where parents can find out about pro-child tourist attractions. We will call it Places to take the kids!.

Building such a community website requires a lot of time and effort, and it will be tempting to take the easy road toward intermingled PHP and HTML. We expect our website to be a key resource for many years, and following good software engineering principles now will pay off many times over the lifetime of the project. Zend Framework’s MVC system will help us to do things the right way. There is even a side benefit of being quicker, as we can take advantage of the simplicity and convention-over-configuration principles to ensure that our code is easy to write and refactor.

Before we build the basic website, we will focus on what we intend to build and the features it will need. We will then be able to set up an initial database and code the first pages.

3.1. Initial Planning of a Website

3.2. Initial Coding

3.3. The Home Page

3.4. Summary