Part of what was edited out of the posted transcript appears to be the questions and answers at the end. This is unfortunate, because they were some of the best parts of the talk. Mr. Pollan fielded questions regarding local food consumption and production, how the country handles food aid to other countries, and victory gardens on the white house lawn, among others. A number of these questions centered around a recent article of his in the New York Times.

They videotaped the event so I was hoping they would put it online. As yet I haven’t seen it show up, or at least haven’t found it anywhere. I guess if they are only posting edited transcripts, there’s not much hope to see the full session in video. Oh well.

I should mention that I discovered this event via one of my new-found favorite local blogs. Portland Psst! serves up “Food gossip. Reviews. And overheards.”, and offers a solid linkroll to boot. It’s not the easiest to pronounce when telling your friends about it (Portland what?), but Portland Psst! is a highly reccomended addition to your newsreader. What’s more, they just celebrated their 1,111th posting (on 11/1, no less!), so hop on over and give ‘em a slap on the back and a hearty hullo.

Multiple actions per request with the Zend Framework

This is one of those features you don’t think about until you need it and it’s not there. The documentation for dispatch() describes the process pretty well:

Routing takes place exactly once, using the values in the request object when dispatch() is called. Dispatching takes place in a loop; a request may either indicate multiple actions to dispatch, or the controller or a plugin may reset the request object to force additional actions to dispatch. When all is done, the front controller returns a response.

It’s features like this that add elegance to a set of tools.

Zend Framework’s flexible view interface for portability

Some frameworks come with their own template syntax – by default, Zend just uses PHP. However with Zend_View_Interface you can roll your own template system, or easily build a wrapper for a third party engine like Smarty.

Some folks commented that over the years they had been through several back-end systems, and having the front-end in smarty was a huge timesaver. Using Zend_View_Interface you could conceivably even switch template engines if you had to.

Deployment and Subversion

All sorts of other information came up out of various conversations we had as a group. Here are a few off the top of my head.

• It looks like the Symfony framework has some deployment tools available.
• There were a few subversion hosting services suggested, including Assembla, which looks impressive (the image annotation feature sounds especially slick).

If you’re in the area, sign up or keep an eye on the Burlington PHP Users Group mailing list for word of the next meeting.

• My friends brother’s band, Böne Cöbra (think big hair, heavy metal, and the 80’s) is playing tonight.
• The Complaints, a band with lots of great covers from my “youth” (i.e. solid 90’s modern rock) are coming to Ri-Ra’s Saturday night.
• Yar! The Lake Champlain Dragon Boat Festival is this weekend (Sunday, to be exact).

If you are around the Burlington area this weekend, and any of these look interesting, sign up and join me online and in person.