Where to put code required by the layout in Zend Framework?

Question

I am using Zend_Layout for the layout of my Zend Framework application. It is very simple, but I still have a few operations that I need to do in the layout. For now, the code is included between PHP brackets, but I feel like this is not really the cleanest way to go.

I saw people using plugins, but I don't think this is the way I want to go. Oviously, I could extract the "complicated" part, do it in a nice action/controller manner, and use a placeholder in the layout. Is this the way to go ? Do you have examples of such things (for instance the navigation menu delegated in its own action) ?

Answer 1

As takeshin said, the navigation() placeholder is probably the way to go. However, I did not want to go through the setup of Zend_Navigation for this particular case, so I used a custom view helper.

application/views/helpers/Menu.php :

<?php

class Zend_View_Helper_Menu extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract {

    public function menu() {
        // my code ...
        $this->view->menu = $menu;

        return $this->view->render('helpers/menu.phtml');
    }

}

application/views/scripts/helpers/menu.phtml :

<ul>
    <?php foreach ($this->menu as $item) { // print menu } ?>
</ul>

This way, I can simply call this helper from my layout :

...
<div id="menu">
    <?php echo $this->menu(); ?>
</div>
...