ZEND - best practice for including a custom functions folder

[U4EA]

Hi,

 

It's my first post here.

 

I consider myself pretty IT savvy, having studied various technologies such as advanced MS Office/VBA, PHP/SQL, JS/jQuery, (X)HTML/CSS etc. I have developed websites before but I am currently in the process of learning ZEND as I am trying to build 2 small scale commercial websites and also an enterprise level website for a company I am starting. ZEND is coming to be slowly but surely, but I am also at times finding it hard to get answers to certain questions.

 

Before I start asking questions, I should state I am working with ZEND V1.12 and using NetBeans as the IDE.

 

So, here goes the first of that is sure to be many questions...

 

I am using a jQuery slider on the index page on one of the new sites I am building. The slider works by hard coding the done with the slider image URLs inside a container div. I have built a custom function that takes 2 parameters - a path to the folder containing the images, and the required file extension. As an example: -

 

<?php
function galGetTopPhotos($path, $ext) {

	//Get array of files
	$images = glob($path . "*.$ext");

	sort($images);

	//Create HTML marked array of images
	$html_string = "";

	foreach($images as $image)
	{
		$html_string .= '<img src="'.$image.'" />';
	}

	return $html_string;

}

$img_html = galGetTopPhotos('slider/images/', 'jpg');


?>

 

Edit: I accidently posted the original thread at this point without completing it. So I will complete it below...

 

Before I begin to talk about how to include a function like this in the controller, can I ask the best practice for including the custom function script itself within a ZEND application? I would assume it would reside in library/functions. Aside from that, how should it be included? In application.ini?

 

Many thanks!

 

Edit:

 

Should this be a helper class?

Edited October 23, 2012 by U4EA