The premise of the application we build in this book is that it is a "Web 2.0" application. What this means is that (among other things) our application generates accessible and standards-compliant code while making heavy of use of Ajax. We achieve this by using the Smarty Template Engine and Cascading Style Sheets, as well as the Prototype JavaScript library. Additionally, we create a fun and intuitive interface by applying simple visual effects on various pages using the Scriptaculous JavaScript library.

To help with the development of the extensive PHP code in this book, we use the Zend Framework. This is an open source PHP 5 library that contains many different components that you can easily use in any of your day-to-day development. We use many of the Zend Framework components in this book, such as database abstraction (with a focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL), logging, authentication, and search.

The application we build in this book is a collaborative blogging tool. It will allow users to register and create a personal blog. When creating blog posts, users will be able upload images, apply tags, and assign locations (using Google Maps). We will also look at how to use microformats when displaying user blog posts.

Quentin Zervaas