Fat Models

After searching for a long time I still couldn’t find any tutorials on how to set up my directories and code to enable a nice tidy logical folder structure that contains each module of a larger application.

The standard (non-modular) structure is as follows.

web_root/
    application/
        controllers/
        views/
            scripts/
        models/
    library/
    htdocs/

To use a modular structure is actually very simple.
Create a ‘modules’ directory under the ‘application’ directory.
You guessed it – place all your module directories here. In each module directory is a standard MVC structure that you would normally see below the ‘application’ dir.

For example say you had a public area and an admin area. This is how it might look.

web_root/
    application/
        modules/
            admin/
                controllers/
                views/
                    scripts/
                models/
            guest/
                controllers/
                views/
                    scripts/
                models/

    library/
    htdocs/

This can be extended for as many modules as you wish.

You now need to declare where the modules are located to your scripts. There are a few ways to achieve this, but by far the easiest is to add one line of code to the bootstrap file.

$front->addModuleDirectory('/web_root/application/modules');

Thats it, unless you are using Zend_Layout which I plan to cover in part two of this tutorial.
For more information look in the Zend Framework Manual.