Until last week, I had never experienced what must have been incredibly frustrating to most developers: the fact that the self keyword in PHP refers to the class it is located in, and not necessarily a class that extends it. I personally ran into this problem when trying to extend Zend_Auth. Being a singleton, the constructor in Zend_Auth is protected, and the static method Zend_Auth::getInstance() instantiates itself. The problem is, when extended, My_Auth::getInstance() still returns an instance of Zend_Auth. The solution was to duplicate the static method in my My_Auth class, which worked properly. For example:

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Back in January, I wrote about my feelings that Subversion still beats Git when it comes to the corporate environment. I pointed out that Git has some great features, but that the corporate world was heavily invested in Subversion, and was likely to stay that way.

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Leaders of the open source community are always trying to encourage others to contribute. Volunteer contributors are always in short supply, and most open source projects are driven by volunteers, so recruitment is a big component of any open source project lead. Elizabeth Naramore put together a great list of reasons why people tend to shy away from contributing and did a great job highlighting some solutions. I want to add my own voice and experience about one of the truisms of open source development:

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One of the things I’m always looking for is ways to improve performance with the applications I write. While a few applications are write-heavy, most are read-heavy: that is, reading the database is the predominant behavior (for example, this WordPress blog reads the database far more often than it writes to the database). Additionally, Zend Framework is (comparatively) slow at handling requests, offering a throughput of about 67 requests per second on my machine, while loading static pages came in at a whopping 750 requests per second.*

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In the last two entries, we examined creating a navigation structure with Zend_Navigation, and then we examined using that structure with the Zend Navigation View Helper. In both discussions, we focused on creating navigation items and menus, and inherently these items were available to all users regardless of access controls. But what happens when you have special areas of your site, say for subscribers or administrators? Controlling access is something that all web developers must do at some point. This is where integration between Zend_Navigation and Zend_Acl comes in.

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