The home page of a Zend application

We are quickly going to look at getting your first page up. If you have set up quickstart guide you will already have your first page correctly set up.

The Zend Framework Quickstart guide really gives an excellent explanation of this:

Model-View-Controller
So what exactly is this MVC pattern everyone keeps talking about, and why should you care? MVC is much more than just a three-letter acronym (TLA) that you can whip out anytime you want to sound smart; it has become something of a standard in the design of modern web applications. And for good reason. Most web application code falls under one of the following three categories: presentation, business logic, and data access. The MVC pattern models this separation of concerns well. The end result is that your presentation code can be consolidated in one part of your application with your business logic in another and your data access code in yet another. Many developers have found this well-defined separation indispensable for keeping their code organized, especially when more than one developer is working on the same application.

and for the action controllers:

Your application's action controllers contain your application workflow, and do the work of mapping your requests to the appropriate models and views.

An action controller should have one or more methods ending in "Action"; these methods may then be requested via the web. By default, Zend Framework URLs follow the schema /controller/action, where "controller" maps to the action controller name (minus the "Controller" suffix) and "action" maps to an action method (minus the "Action" suffix).

Typically, you always need an IndexController, which is a fallback controller and which also serves the home page of the site, and an ErrorController, which is used to indicate things such as HTTP 404 errors (controller or action not found) and HTTP 500 errors (application errors).

The default IndexController is as follows:

// application/controllers/IndexController.php

class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{

    public function init()
    {
        /* Initialize action controller here */
    }

    public function indexAction()
    {
        // action body
    }
}

For the view:

Views in Zend Framework are written in plain old PHP. View scripts are placed in application/views/scripts/, where they are further categorized using the controller names. In our case, we have an IndexController and an ErrorController, and thus we have corrsponding index/ and error/ subdirectories within our view scripts directory. Within these subdirectories, you will then find and create view scripts that correspond to each controller action exposed; in the default case, we thus have the view scripts index/index.phtml and error/error.phtml.

View scripts may contain any markup you want, and use the  closing tag to insert PHP directives.

Take care!
Tjorriemorrie