Zend Form: How do I make it bend to my will?

Question

I've read the manual many times, I've scoured the posts offered by Google on the subject, I have even bought a couple of books that deal with ZF. Now, why am I still confused?

I can, using Zend_Form, make a form that validates and functions fine. What I cannot do it make a form that looks exactly like I want it to look with the error messages that I want it to have. I want custom buttons, I want funky layouts, I want to insert text in the midst of the form, etc.

Does anyone have a simple way of achieving these sorts of things? Something that makes me feel like the framework is saving me time rather than costing? I could forego Zend Form... make my own form, have its action hit a page to validate and process the posted data and I could do it about as fast as I can type but I really want to "get" this and be able to use it as it was apparently intended.

Any advice? Any simple "how to's" for custom buttons, funky layouts and basic (or rather advanced as there are tons of basic tutorials that skip over the harder issues) "getting things done" with zend form?

Answer 1

ANSWER HERE. HOPE it will help you. I went through the enormal amount of information till I found it.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Page name: *</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->header_title;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>H1 tag: *</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->h1_tag;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Page URL: *</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->url;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Meta Description: </td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->meta_description;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Meta Keywords: </td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->meta_keywords;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Short Description: *</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->short_description;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td colspan="2"><a href="<?php echo $this->websiteUrl;?>backend_template/list?placeValuesBeforeTB_=savedValues&TB_iframe=true&height=200&width=300&modal=true"
                           title="add a caption to title attribute / or leave blank" class="thickbox">Open iFrame Modal</a></td>
         <td>
            <a href="<?php echo $this->websiteUrl;?>backend_template/list?placeValuesBeforeTB_=savedValues&TB_iframe=true&height=200&width=300&modal=true" onclick="javascript:getDataFromAddPage()" title="Select Template For Page" class="thickbox" > TEST FORM  </a>
         </td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Featured: </td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->featured;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Mark as 404: </td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->is_404page;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Show in Navigation Menu: </td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->in_navmain;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>Show in Static Menu:</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->in_navstatic;?></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->submit;?></td>
        <td><?php echo $this->pageForm->button_close;?></td>
    </tr>

</table>

Answer 2

If you just want to add arbitrary markup before or after your form elements without using the ViewScript decorator, you could use my AnyMarkup decorator: http://www.zfsnippets.com/snippets/view/id/62

For example, here is how you would prepend an input field with an image inside a wrapper tag (needs include paths for autoloading to be set correctly):

$form->addElement('text', 'my_field', array(
  'label' => 'Enter Info:',
  'decorators' => array(
    'ViewHelper',
    array('AnyMarkup', array(
      'markup' => '<span class="imgwrapper">'.
        '<img src="info.png" alt="info icon"/></span>'),
      'placement' => 'prepend'
    ),
    'HtmlTag',
    'Label'
  )
);