After few days reviewing CakePHP (take a look my pre-review here and quickstart here) we decided to use Zend framework instead. This decision was made today after a job interview with new programmer. He already has experience in Zend development (his blog post - Slovenian language only). This said it should be clear that decision was based on existent knowledge and not which product is better.

• Zend framework download
• basic quickstart (unfortunately really basic)
• Naming Conventions
• Coding Style

Zend tutorials & stuff

• zend screencasts
• tutorial list
• IBM tutorials(registration required)

blog tutorial

• Part 1: Introductory Planning
• Part 2: The MVC Application Architecture
• Part 3: A Simple Hello World Tutorial
• Part 4: Setting the Design Stage with Blueprint CSS Framework and Zend_Layout
• Part 5: Creating Models with Zend_Db and adding an Administration Module
• Part 6: Introduction to Zend_Form and Authentication with Zend_Auth
• Part 7: Authorisation with Zend_Acl and Revised Styling
• Part 8: Creating and Editing Blog Entries with a dash of HTMLPurifier
• Part 9: Exploring Zend_View and Displaying Blog Entries
• Part 10: The Public Comment System, reCAPTCHA and Akismet Filtering

How to break code into modules

• modular structure documentation

Database abstraction layer

• Zend has built-in support for PDO (Php Data Objects - Zend) / PHP PDO documentation
  • it has to be installed and configured on server
• till now we used AdoDb
• AdoDb vs Zend PDO forum thread
• database abstraction cost - blog article

To use Zend Db with PDO and MySQL on Win platform I used

$user = 'test'; $pass = 'testPass'; 	 
try{
   Zend_Loader::loadClass("Zend_Db");
   $params = array ('dbname' => 'testDb', 'username'=>$user, 'password'=>$pass);
   $dbh = Zend_Db::factory('PDO_MYSQL', $params);	 
} catch (PDOException $e) 
{
   $e->getMessage(); 
}

$firstQuery = $dbh->query("SELECT * FROM users"); 
$results = $firstQuery->fetchAll();  

print_r($results); //to see what we have stored in db  

Blueprint CSS

CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

• http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss