Dr. Scotty Delicious, DFPA.

I have been busy this last week rebuilding my site. Over the last few months I have been experimenting with the Zend Framework. As far as frameworks go, it fits my coding style better than some of the others I tried (CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, RoR). It is a pretty schwag setup, but there are some things, like Zend_Form, that were just taking too much work to get it functioning & displaying like I wanted to. There is a tremendous amount of flexibility in this framework, but with that comes a LOT of additional ground work.

Previously, this site had been built on the MODx Content Management System. I like MODx, but I was looking for a change and something to sharpen my (PHP) teeth on.

As I set out on this redesign project, my intention was to build the entire application with the Zend Framework. After spending about 50 hours working with it, the site was still nowhere close to ready. So... I decided to roll my own. This site is now build on a combination of the Zend Framework and a heavily modified MODx. I get the convenience of the MODx Document Parser class, and with a little (read as "a lot of") modification, I have Ditto (for the blog) and Jot (for the comments) working with the database abstraction taken care of via Zend_Db_Table. The great thing about using Zend_Db_Table for the database queries is that the entire application lives ouside the web root.

I am curious as to what you think about the design of the site, and if anyone has any success or horror stories on using the Zend Framework, please post a comment. I did roll along with Pádraic Brady's blog, which is a great resource, and I have a few side projects that I think will be perfect as 100% Zend Framework powered, but I needed to get this done post haste.

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