So in my recent work on Kitchenkungfu I’ve been doing allot of work on marrying Zend Framework’s MVC with Smarty templates handling the view layer.
For those of you out there that aren’t familiar with Smarty its a very nicely architected php template engine. People love it because its simple for people with little programming knowledge to work with, nicely encapsulates display logic enforcing controller/view separation by convention and best of all (which is what attracted me) is it’s fast. Smarty actually goes through your template code and compiles it into php so that it doesn’t have to be parsed over and over again. It’s also got its own caching built in which is a big speed gain as well.

After doing a good deal of digging I was able to find a few different blog posts and articles outlining the steps. This entry from the zend manual is a good start for anyone who is interested.

Basically the route they suggest is implementing the Zend_View_Interface functions and creating a Zend_View compatible wrapper around your Smarty object. Once you do that it’s pretty much plug and play. The example in the manual is pretty good but it def leaves some room for improvement so you will have to hack it a bit to take full advantage of Smarty’s tool set.

So after a few hours of head scratching and fiddling I now have a working ZF MVC with Smarty views. I feel good about it and just read on another blog that Flickr uses Smarty for their display layer too which is encouraging. Check back in a few month and I’ll let you know how it’s holding up. Fingers crossed…

So recently in my travels around ye old www.informationsuperhighway.internet I came across a awesome new agile development tool and project management portal called Assembla. They have allot of the usual agile tools like trac, svn, milestones, scrum reports, file/image uploads, wiki etc.

Now thats not revolutionary (see unfuddled.com) by any stretch of the imagination but they have a couple of other good things going for them. One thing is that they offer allot for free. The cheap bastard in me loooves that. Unfuddled for instance offers a free service as well with allot of the same features but you are limited to one project, one user and a small amount of disk space for svn. Assembla is allot more giving. They don’t put a limit on the amount of team members or “spaces” (projects) that you can set up. They also give you 200 mb of disk space for svn which is very generous. On top of all that they have a interesting social aspects where you can set up public spaces which cater to distributed development teams and open source development approaches. There are some cool tools for doing staffing through the site.

They offer a premium service as well which adds in a ton of disk space, phone/email support, ssl and amazon s3 backups (very progressive). I haven’t gotten that deep into it to require that but I would think hands down this site would be worth it should the need arise.

Bottom line:
Assembla offers a really awesome service with a ton of powerful tools and approaches it in a very forward thinking manor and I applaud their efforts. Keep it up guys.

So as you prob noticed (from the hideous default template) I just migrated the site from my old Moveable type install to my new server and a fresh install of WordPress. I loved MT but it was time to move on. So stay tuned… I’ll work on the aesthetics… promiss