Integrated Zend_Layout into this blog

I finished with integrating Zend_Layout into this blog software today. At first I thought it is quite hard to use especially if you want to integrate dynamic navigational contents depending on the current module/controller/action setup. But I came up with a combination of actionStack and Named Response Sections as described in the ZF Documentation of the Layout component, which is quite easy to understand, use and extend.

At each of the major Controllers I put different actions from a specific Navigation Controller on the ActionStack (mostly global per Controller using the init() class method).

A typical controller looks like this:

class BlogController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function init()
    {            
        $this->_helper->actionStack('tagcloud', 'Navigation');
        $this->_helper->actionStack('userinfo', 'Navigation');
    }
}

The NavigationController looks like this:

class NavigationController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function tagcloudAction()
    {
        // Do not render the content of this action to the default output.
        $this->getHelper("ViewRenderer")->setNoRender();

        [...]

        // Append content to secondaryNavigation named response section
        $this->getResponse()->append('secondaryNavigation', $this->view->render('navigation/tagcloud.phtml'));
    }
}

The layout.pthml then just calls certain named sections, for example <=? $this->layout()->secondaryNavigation; ?>