I am making a controller that will be responsible for a bunch of actions and I don't want to have to create a view file for each one, sometimes i just want to output strings.
I could just do echo 'Hello World'; die(); into the action.
but is there a more correct way to do this?
Yes, in the controller you can disable view rendering like this:
$this->getHelper('viewRenderer')->setNoRender();
And you add whatever you like to the output like this:
$this->getResponse()->setBody('Hello Moak!');
There are other things you can do with the Response object too:
$r = $this->getResponse();
$r->setHeader('Content-type', 'text/html', true);
$r->setRawHeader('HTTP/1.1 200 OK');
$r->setHttpResponseCode(200);
$r->clearBody();
$r->setBody('<html><h1>Hello</h1></hello>');