Zend Framework + WordPress

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Introduction

Often it is the case that you want to get extra functionality when you are coding a WordPress plugin or even adding some enhanced functionality such as grabbing images using Amazon S3‘s storage system or including flickr images with functionality that you may not find available with many other plugins available.

As a result you often end up including a number of different libraries that may include the functionality that you are looking for. However, in the long run what ends up happening is many of the libraries need updating, but because of real mechanism to alert you that an update is needed other than you manually checking. As a result the risk and potential for exposure to security threats greatly increases.

In Drupal it is possible to merely include these extra libraries as modules, and then from there they are managed by the Drupal uses the system manager to monitor the status of the module and if it needs updating. With this separated the module would then offer hooks and methods for you to access the various parts of the API that you were looking for.

The first thing someone may say that this is essentially just a plugin? This is true, however, i think because of the way that Drupal is structured there were more modules that evolved that were merely hooks to classes that accessed various APIs. One good comparisson on how WordPress and Drupal modules/plugins are written is the Ubercart vs WP-Ecommerce/e-shop/yak.

What makes the Zend Framework for WordPress so good?

Well the answer to that i guess could be best explained using the case in which we used it. We needed to create a simple REST server on a site built on WordPress as well as have a REST client in order to test  the server and send requests. There were a number of classes and libraries out there like:

  1. EasyRest Framework
  2. PHPClasses REST Server
  3. Simple REST

Conclusion

If you are aware of how extensive, and easy to extend the Ubercart API is i think those who have had to work with any of the WordPress equivalents would admit, in terms of flexibility, scalability, and accessibilty from other modules/plugins via an API, Ubercart is a clear winner.

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