Yes, yet another new revelation. Placeholders. This is awesome, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, a way to specify slightly more global but dynamic content like stuff to go in the left or right nav bars.
The only difficult thing is actually feeding data to a placeholder. Right now I’m doing this by instantiating a fully new decoupled and semi-irrelevant Zend_View to do the rendering, and then I’m passing off the output/contents of that to the placeholder via the append method. This seems to work but also seeems kludgy.
It appears that placeholders also suck up a lot of memory and I can possibly do this simply with partials because, despite what I originally though, though the layout doesn’t receive template variables from the view, the layout partials in fact do. The only difficulty there will be namespacing to prevent naming conflicts among the partials with things like $records or similar.
