In a new entry Knut Urdalen looks at something that some PHP developers might have forgotten about - the return value of the include statement.

PHP never stops surprising me. I just found out that you're able to return values from the inclusion statements (require, require_once, include and include_once) through an example of Zend_Config.

His example puts an array of values inside the include file with a return statement. This script is included from another and, because of the return, the array data is passed back out into a waiting variable set equal to the include statement.

On the KillerPHP.com website, there's this new post starting off a new series (by Jonathan Lebensold) talking about the different components of the Zend Framework.

When Stefan asked me to write about the Zend Framework, I decided I would avoid copy-able code, simply because it doesn't re-enforce good software design. [...] The following is a brief summary of 4 components in the Zend Framework: Zend_Loader, Zend_Log, Zend_Config and Zend_Registry.

For each of the four components, he looks at how they can be used (reason why), some good and bad things about them and he includes some pseudocode to show the format for its use.

Rob Allen has posted an entry to his blog today about some of the fixes/additions he's been making to the Zend_Config module of the Zend Framework:

I've just finished going through the open Zend_Config issues and fixing them all. Nothing major, but a couple of nice fixes and one new function.

Bugs fixed included numbers ZF-2209, ZF-2162 and ZF-2021. The new feature he talks about is the addition of a new function called setReadOnly that lets you lock an object from being changed after it's been set.

Rob Allen has a quick note today about two updates he's made to the Zend_Config module of the Zend Framework:

• Addition of a get method to grab values from a configuration node
• Moved asArray to be deprecated in favor of toArray/

You can download the latest version of the Zend Framework from the project's main site and, to get you started, you can also check out Rob's great Getting Started tutorial

The Zend Developer Zone has posted another in the "Hidden Gems" series by Aaron Wormus, this time looking at the Zend_Config component.

Managing configuration is a pretty simple thing to do in PHP, in fact, I'd bet that at some point in their programming career every php programmer has written code. But as soon as you get a bit bigger you realize that you're going to have trouble accessing your configuration variable.

There are many reasons to manage your configuration data indepenantly from your business logic. One common reason is that you don't want to enter your configuration data into the public versioning system that you use.

Aaron looks at how you can use the component in your application easily including an example using the built-in inheritance functionality to easily manage a move from development to production.