I'm building a web application/ framework and I'm trying to implement blocks/panels (boxes on the right hand side, essentially, choose your own terminology).
It's not necessarily that hard from a technical point-of-view (bar one thing that I'm not quite sure how to do), but what I'm looking for is a consistent, logical approach - any ideas would be appreciated. My approach so far has been as follows; - I'm using the placeHolder helper to inject the boxes into the layout - I've got a "box" view script to render the box, with the title, css class and content as member variables - I have a Controller helper to render a box, which essentially creates an instance of the Box view script, injects the parameters and prepends / appends the result to the appropriate placeholder Some of the boxes are common to all/most pages, so I'm performing this in a Controller plugin. What would be most useful, however, is to create boxes using actions attached to the various modules and controllers. E.g., a list of online users would be best created by the User controller, but inserted into the page using a Controller plugin (e.g. in a postDispatch method). Also, by creating a box using a Controller/Action, I'd be making it easy to switch my application to rendering boxes using an AJAX call. What would be the best way to do this? Is there an easy and logical way of, say, firing off a call to /user/online and injecting the result into a method within a Controller plugin? I'd imagine many people have thought about this, so I'd be interested to get a discussion going about peoples' approaches. Thanks -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Strategy-for-%22panels%22---%22blocks%22-tp20758783p20758783.html Sent from the Zend Framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
