Zend Framework – subdirectories and deprecating action within the URL

Question

I’m in the process of learning to use the Zend Framework, and I’m therefore trying to grasp the concept of MVC. Through the Zend manual, and a very helpful Youtube video tutorial I have sort of understood the concept – still there are some things I need to clarify.

The web project I’m currently working on is a web site for an organization I’m a part of. It consists of:

• The public portion, mainly consisting of information about us, a calendar and some media – mostly static information, but a couple of pages, like the calendar, will need to retrieve some data from the DB.
• The internal pages, which after a login will allow users to RSVP to events and comment them as well.
  • The administrative controls , allows the admins to add events and manage users etc.

So far it looks like Zend wants the URL to look like this: http?://[domain]/[controller]/[action] So here are my questions:

1. Do I always have to have an action in the url, or will the lack of an action use the index-action as default?
2. Can I have a subdirectory to distinguish between the internal and public portions of the site: http://[domain]/internal/[controller]/[action] ?
   1. Can this be done simply by having a subfolder within the different MVC-folders somehow? The latter question isn’t really that important, but I’d like to separate the two portions of the site somehow.

Answer 1

The questions you are asking are in the area of routing which generally means: Given a URL on which the HTTP request is being made:

1. Which controller should be instantiated?
2. Which action on that controller should be run?
3. What parameters should be passed to the action?

The routing docs in the ZF Manual explain how routing works by default and how you can specify your own routing. But looking at them now, I don't think they do a great job of introducing the subject matter for a first time user. This post might be better, though it is only a single, simple example.

Answer 2

Do I always have to have an action in the url, or will the lack of an action use the index-action as default?

A controller can have a default action which is triggered when no action is specified in the URL. Look for default action or index action.

Can I have a subdirectory to distinguish between the internal and public portions of the site: http://[domain]/internal/[controller]/[action] ?

Yes you can have, but I assume subdirectory refers to your URL, not to the actual file-layout on the server. You can do so by just having a controller per "subdirectory".

Can this be done simply by having a subfolder within the different MVC-folders somehow? The latter question isn’t really that important, but I’d like to separate the two portions of the site somehow.

You can separate per controller and you can even separate with modules. As far as I know of modules in zend-framework, this will all be in it's own sudirectory per module.

I think you're especially looking for Using a Conventional Modular Directory Structure.