[ZF] Translating a page's title

So it's been a while, eh? Happy New Year (and Chinese New Year, while we're at it)!

For a project, we're finally in testing phase and all of a sudden, I point something out that looks wrong: the translator works perfectly... except for the page titles. By that, I mean the following tag:

<title>Title</title>

What gives? Well, my understanding is that the translator is not yet set in the Bootstrap when the

$this->view->headTitle($label);

is called.

The first thing I tried? Adding the translate() method to it:¹

this->view->headTitle($this->view->translate($label));

... that didn't work at all. Simply no change. Great.

Then I put my thinking cap on (it's still early in the morning), and thougt this through. First of all, here is how the main parts of my Bootstrap file are laid out:
- Register plugins
- Register routes
- Prepare navigation (menus, prepare breadcrumbs, and set page title)
- Prepare translation
- Configure e-mail settings for sending stuff
- Prepare the view

Now this little brain of mine decided to kick in this morning, and made me realize: what if we prepared the translation before setting some text on the output page?

So there I am, moving the _initTranslate() method up a little, right over the _initNavigation(). Just leave the line of code that includes the translate() method ([1] above) when setting the page's title, and as long as $label is defined in your language file(s) and the translator is set correctly, shazam, it'll work like a beauty!

Final trick: you can prepend (or append, I guess) anything to your head title! In your _initView() method, be sure to do the following:

$view = new Zend_View();
$view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT'); // Or whatever
$view->headTitle('Client - ');

// Add more settings here if needed

$view_renderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getStaticHelper('ViewRenderer');
$view_renderer->setView($view);

return $view;

By doing this, all your pages' titles will look like "Client - Translated page title". Awesome, isn't it?

[ZF] Containing form elements in DIVs (or other HTML tags) with classes

Long time, no see.

So, let's say you're building a dynamic form and would like each dt (label) and dd (input field) pair to be grouped in a div,with one or more specific classes added to this div.

It's quite easy, actually!

// Wrap element in div with classes
$element->addDecorator(
 array('openDiv' =>'HtmlTag'),
 array(
  'tag' => 'div',
  'openOnly' => true,
  'class' => $attrib_class
 )
);
$element->addDecorator(
array('closeDiv' =>'HtmlTag'),
 array('tag' => 'div', 'closeOnly' => true)
);

Considering your custom class name(s) are in the $attrib_class variable, this will output something similar to this:

<div class="class-1 class-2">
 <dt id="item-id-label">
  <label for="item-id">label</label>
 </dt>
 <dd id="item-id-element">
  <input type="text" name="item-id" id="item-id" value="">
 </dd>
</div>

And there you have it, customizable form elements!

[ZF] Adding links to form elements

Clicks, there's always too many of them.

Now imagine a form with a hundred checkboxes. Sure, you can pre-check all of them or leave them empty, but it would be much easier for the user to have a "select all" and "select none" buttons.

For more efficiency, it's better to have one for each set of checkboxes, and there's nothing better than to put these links as a decorator to the form element containing the checkboxes.

$form_element = new Zend_Form_Element_MultiCheckbox(

	'name',

	array(

		'description'	=> '<a href="javascript: void();">Select all</a> <a href="javascript: void();">Select none</a>'

	)

);

Now that's nice, but instead of having links, the HTML code has been escaped and that's of no use at all.

There's an easy trick to this: just set the decorators!

'decorators'	=> array(

	'ViewHelper',

	array(

		'Description',

		array('escape' => FALSE)

	),

	'FormElements',

	'Form'

)

The important trick is to set the escape value to false, so that the HTML characters won't be converted.

And there we have it, two beautiful links that will same users a lot of hassle.

[ZF] Adding section titles in a Zend_Form

Do you have a Zend_Form with many elements and need to add section titles for it to be more user-friendly?

Nothing is as simple as this!

// Add section title
$personal_section = new Zend_Form_Element_Hidden('personal_section');
$personal_section->setLabel('Personal information');
$personal_section->setDecorators(
    array(
        'ViewHelper',
        'Description',
        'Errors',
        array('Label', array('tag' => 'h2'))
    )
);
$this->addElement($personal_section);

This basically creates a hidden input with a label, and we're just modifying this to use an H2 tag instead of the regular one. Not very nice technically, but very effective!