Please take a look at http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-958
We propose to move Zend.php to <zf-home>/library/Zend/Zend.php. The class name would continue to be 'Zend', and we're not suggesting changing any methods within the class. Therefore no usage of this class would change. The only change in your application would be that you need to change this: require_once 'Zend.php'; To this: require_once 'Zend/Zend.php'; Alternatively, you could add the 'Zend' directory to your include_path. The benefit of this change is to simplify integration of a Zend Framework tree in an application tree. You could use svn externals, for instance. The disadvantage is that it does not follow the ZF convention that class names always match the physical location of the class file. But this is the only class that needs to be an exception to this convention. I volunteer to make this change. I'll update other classes in the ZF tree. I'll write a note in the manual to tell users what they need to do. I'll write a docblock in Zend.php acknowledging that it is an exception to the class-to-location convention. If there are no strong objections, I'll make this change. Regards, Bill Karwin
