Hello World

By default, ZF doesn't support this very well: You would need to manually set the view in every action to the layout script and set a variable in that to point to the action view script.

However, we can easily change this behavior. As you may know, the ViewRenderer helper automatically renders the action's own view. If we modify the ViewRenderer, we won't have to do anything at all - just like when not using layouts.

Making a custom ViewRenderer

We can simply extends the Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer class to change its behavior to use layouts.

We need to override the renderScript method so, that instead of rendering the action's script, it renders the layout and assigns the name of the action script to the view so that the layout can use it to include the action's script.

I'll call my ViewRenderer simply ViewRenderer_Layout. Like this:

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Controller/Action/Helper/ViewRenderer.php';
class ViewRenderer_Layout extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer
{
        public function renderScript($script,$name=null)
        {
                if($name===null)
                        $name = $this->getResponseSegment();

                //Name of the action script is assigned to LAYOUT_CONTENT
                $this->view->assign('LAYOUT_CONTENT',$script);

                $this->getResponse()->appendBody(
                        $this->view->render('layout.phtml'),
                        $name
                );

                $this->setNoRender();
        }

        public function getName()
        {
                return 'ViewRenderer';
        }
}
?>

So that's quite simple. We also override the getName function so that it correctly returns the class' name as "ViewRenderer" which is needed so that it properly replaces the old ViewRenderer when assigned to the HelperBroker.

Using our custom renderer

To use this instead of the default one, we simply replace the ViewRenderer in the HelperBroker with our shiny new one:

$viewHelper = new ViewRenderer_Layout();
Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewHelper);

If you're using the default view paths, you need to put your layout.phtml file to application/views/scripts/layout.phtml. With this done, you should have a working layout ViewRenderer.

A small improvement

You might want to use a different layout on some pages, so let's add the option of changing the name of the layout file to the class.

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Controller/Action/Helper/ViewRenderer.php';
class ViewRenderer_Layout extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer
{
        protected $_layoutFileName = 'layout.phtml';

        public function setLayoutFileName($name)
        {
                $this->_layoutFileName = $name;
        }

        public function renderScript($script,$name=null)
        {
                if($name===null)
                        $name = $this->getResponseSegment();

                $this->view->assign('LAYOUT_CONTENT',$script);

                $this->getResponse()->appendBody(
                        $this->view->render($this->_layoutFileName),
                        $name
                );
   
                $this->setNoRender();
        }

        public function getName()
        {
                return 'ViewRenderer';
        }
}
?>

So we add a variable which shall store the name of our layout and a method for setting it. You may also want to define a method for getting it, but I'll leave that up to you. We use the _layoutFileName variable in the render method's parameters instead of the hardcoded value and that's it.

Note that if you change the viewBasePathSpec to something like application/views/:module like I do in one of my projects, the layout.phtml file will be automatically loaded from application/views/modulename/scripts/layout.phtml, so you can define a different layout based on the module even without using the method for changing it.



So there we have it. I hope you find it useful, I sure do.