Zend Framework has been designed from the ground up to make PHP development as easy – and fun – as possible while promoting best practices and providing an extensible framework for complex applications. Content management systems are a particularly important class of applications – after all, serving content is what the web does best. As the project lead of the Digitalus CMS project, a commercial CMS built on Zend Framework, Forrest Lyman is particularly well-qualified to guide the reader through the involved process of building a full-fledged CMS.

This book reflects the best practices that we have discovered with the help of the Zend Framework community over the last four years. Forrest brings our MVC components to life, while describing data persistence in detail using Zend_Db_Table and MySQL. Essential components for CMSs, such as Zend_Search_Lucene and Zend_Feed, are used to develop ZF modules to implement practical use cases. Finally, he covers advanced topics such as performance optimization and designing your CMS for extension.

Those looking for a guide to using the latest components in Zend Framework will not be disappointed – Zend_Tool, Zend_Navigation, Zend_Application, and more are put to use in the extensive running example CMS application.

This book is the perfect complement to the documentation that can be found on http://framework.zend.com.

Wil Sinclair

Project Lead, Zend Framework