Zend DevZone has a new article up.

What is a View Helper?

A View Helper is simply a class that follows particular naming conventions, When attached to a view object, you can call the helper as if it were a method of the view object itself. The View object retains helper instances, which means that they retain states between calls.

Common use cases for view helpers include:

* Accessing models
* Performing complex or repeatable display logic
* Manipulating and formatting model data
* Persisting data between view scripts

In his blog post, he used something that I didn’t know or hear about — headLink() and headScript(). So I went ahead to add a comment and asked for an example. Then I got it — he has a new post on how to use Zend_View placeholders.

/me gives free beer to Matthew.