Jorge Guntanis

Modular Zend Framework in 60 seconds or less!

The Zend Framework is, in my opinion; the quickest, easiest and more robust way to get a MVC environment running in PHP. You can get a base environment set up with a one liner. After that, you can start writing code that matters… priceless.

I’ve been refactoring one of my pet projects, mae.cr, originally written using NodeJS. The reason I’m refactoring using PHP has really nothing to do with NodeJS, but more with the available time I have right now… but I digress. 

I needed a modular MVC framework to accomplish the organization I wanted, we use something similar but much more complex at my day job. The documentation that Zend provides is really convoluted with a bunch of details that I really didn’t need and after figuring out exactly what I needed to do, it really took less than 60 seconds to accomplish.

This is the recipe!

First, you wanna create the initial skeleton, you do this using the Zend provided binary zf.

# cd /path/to/api.example.com
# zf create project .

Now we just need to clean up a few folders ZF created but we don’t need for a modular set-up. After doing this, modify the application configuration to load the module tree instead of the default controller.

# cd application
# rm -Rf controllers views models
# vim configs/application.ini

Replace the resources.frontController.controllerDirectory directory with the following value:

resources.frontController.moduleDirectory = APPLICATION_PATH “/modules”

We are ready to create new modules, create a default module and a controller with the index Action for it.

# zf create module default
# zf create controller Index 1 default

Done! You now have a working Modular MVC Framework for PHP that you can access in the form of:

http://api.example.com/module/controller/action

Hope it helps!