I've been working with Zend Framework (using Doctrine as the ORM) for quite a while now, and done a few projects with it.
In a few upcoming projects I am requiring the need for widgets similar to how Wordpress does them. You have a post/page, which could look like:
Subscribe to my newsletter:
[subscribe/]
View my events
[events limit=5 sort=date/]
View this page's comments
[comments/]
Where say the subscribe widget would be replaced with Blog::subscribeWidget, and the events could be replaced with Events::eventsWidget, etc.
Now it has done my head in the past few weeks about how on earth do I do this??? I've come up with the following options:
I could place the widgets within controllers, and then call them like actions. Problem here is that code could be flying between controllers, and I have read this is expensive due to the amount of dispatches.
I could place the widgets as view helpers. So within the view I could have $this->renderPage($Page), which would then attend to all the widgets. Problem here is that what if the widgets need to do some business logic, like for example posting a new comment, that really shouldn't be within the view, should it?
The other option is to place widgets within the model? But then how on earth do they then render content for display?
Extra complications come when:
Say the comments widget would also handle posting, deleting of comments etc.
Say for the events listing, if I want to do an ajax request to the next page of events, using method #2 (view helpers) how would this work?