This afternoon I updated beefsack.com to come in line with Zend Framework 1.8.1, which was a bit of work but has cleaned up my code a lot, especially my bootstrap and initialisation code. Now it is much easier to do initialisation code in the bootstrap, as it is now a class and you can implement initialisation as methods to clean things up. I still use a front controller plugin though for extra initialisation after routing.

After all of the changes in 1.8, Zend is a lot simpler to get into, particularly thanks to the new Zend Tool which automates the creation of projects and project components like controllers and views. All of the documentation has been updated too, and the new quick start guide is much more concise and straightforward.