Wow, only a year and a half since my first post!  I’m making progress …

Anyhow, I’m learning Zend Framework 2.

You see, my band (currently dormant musical project), Spitting Angels, has a website. I’m really rather proud of the fact that the website is mostly all custom hand-edited code by yours truly.  I’ve got a bespoke admin interface, shit-hot integration with VBulletin forum software, and more!  But the website has gotten long in the tooth (looking at you, 2002!) and a few years back I realized for some of my cool ideas for the site to come to fruition, I’d need a complete rewrite from the ground up for most of it.

I started looking into PHP frameworks as well as exploring other languages like Ruby and Python (and revisiting Perl thanks to it’s heavy use in my day job).  Didn’t get far with Ruby but love Python but decided my web-hosting situation warranted that I stick with PHP for now.  Done right, a proper Object-Oriented MVC framework could conceivably be refactored in another language eventually, started with the backend (Model) be rewritten in Python once time and knowledge and resources allow.  That’s the long term plan anyway.  After much research I decided to go with Zend Framework, at the time version 1.

Although I’ve been developing with PHP for 10+ years, I’m self-taught and am just now learning about MVC and other OOP concepts.  Sometimes I wish I had gone to school for a proper CS degree instead of wasting my potential in art school.

So I quickly ran into a wall with the ZF1 framework.  After walking through a few tutorials, it became clear that the tutorial authors, while well-meaning, were simply not gearing their tutorials to noobs like me.  Even after reading through a few books on the subject, I had no idea how the puzzle pieces of ZF1 all fit together, particularly the concepts of the Front Controller, Bootstrapping, and the Registry.  Even though my personal code was spaghetti code, it worked and I stepped away for a bit, learning more Python and even diving into to C, C++, and Qt for proper application development.

So throughout 2012, I saw news on ZF2 development and decided I would revisit once it had stabilized.  Now I’m back on that horse.  I know a little more about OOP, thanks to my dabbling in C++.  I get the broad strokes.  Still don’t quite understand shit like polymorphism or overloading but I’ll get there.

So, what’s the point of this?  Well, I’m learning Zend Framework 2 and I suppose if I can take the time to work out some of the various bits and pieces to make enough sense of it to make a website out of it, I should document some of that gained knowledge so that others can maybe learn something as well. If I take some time out, you’ll see the fruits of my labor here in the near (or distant) future.