Honestly, it’s pretty easy to do. But when searching for documentation, it wasn’t easy to find exactly what I wanted to do, so I figured I should blog about it.

What I needed was a way to easily connect my existing web application with facebook connect. What’s Facebook Connect? In a nutshell, it allows users to log in and register to your site via their facebook credentials. Here’s some more in – depth detail if you’re looking for more information; this tutorial assumes you know what the deal is with Facebook Connect and want to get it onto your application soon.

I added facebook connect to a site running PHP and using MySQL for the database; this tutorial assumes you will be doing so as well. I used Facebook’s PHP API to connect my site, and the same goes with that. If you’ve ever build a facebook application before, you’re familiar with Facebook’s API.

The last assumption I make is that you have already built a site with a full user login system, your site allows cookies, and caters to javascript enabled browsers. Basically, you built this site of yours after 2002 or so.

After the break we’ll get to it.

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Update – check out the post at AmpTools, if you’re using a copy of Zend Framework version 1.7.8 or above – the below code may not work for you.

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Recently on a project I was developing using the Zend Framework, I needed to validate a form using a CAPTCHA image.

CAPTCHA example image

For those who don’t know, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ever been to a website and seen an image like the one to the right? Basically, it’s a way to make sure a human is filling out the form and not just some robot. How? Robots can’t decifer what words *might* be from an image – only a human can.

Zend Framework has a set of great classes included to take away a lot of the headaches involved with setting up a CAPTCHA system. The one I use is Zend_Captcha_Image, which creates an image for you and sets up a Session so you will be able to validate all information appropriately. Problem is, there’s little documentation out there on this.

The best example I found was on Robert Basic’s Blog. My only gripe about it was that it used Zend_Form.

Zend_Form is a great class and all, but if you’re like me, you don’t like using it because you give up the control you get over Form creation + validation. It’s a great way to skip writing HTML for a form – but what if your client wants a very specific design attached to their form? Then Zend_Form becomes a hassle to design to a specification. And yes, Zend_Form makes validation easy, but what if your client wants to set up very specific validation messages? Again, Zend_Form becomes more trouble than it’s worth. Yes, it is flexible enough as a class to edit it any way you want, but I feel NOT using Zend_Form will ultimately make your forms more flexible.

So, beyond the break, I’ll show you everything you need to know to use Zend_Captcha_Image WITHOUT Zend_Form! If you’d like to learn the implementation using Zend_Form, please visit Robert Basic’s Blog.

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