Best practice creating dynamic sidebar with zend framework

Question

What is best practice to create dynamic sidebar or other non content layout places with zend framework. At this moment I created controller witch i called WidgetsController. In

Answer 1

Yes, folks, my bet is that the answer from the Code Igniter folks is the correct approach. Actually its helpful to see how CI does it simply, and to make comparisons. It's basically the same in ZF, except that instead of the "named view" ZF has "Partials".

ZF simply has more imposed discipline, such as layouts + views + partials, and more internal machinery to implement this, which actually does make it run half as fast, whereas code igniter just seems to have flattened this whole apparatus into "named views".

(I haven't yet made up my mind as to whether ZF has over-cooked it or whether some CI steaks have to remain raw in the middle.)

If you use $navigation->setPartial(blah blah) then the leadup array (technically this kind of data constitutes the "model" part of the MVC thing) and is made available to the partial.

So there you have it, the idea seems to be don't pull the display aspects of the model into the controller, push the model display stuff out to the view processing machinery.

I am just about to have a go at this myself, I did do a search on partials in the view helpers section of the Zend Manual to find this, even though the examples are a bit thin.

Wish me luck Keith