Hi,

I have a pretty large online-store project ahead of me. I have the next 2 months to develop it and am starting now; I am confident I can finish this in time with my 'old' coding style.

However, I have installed and gone through the 'getting started' tutorial of Zend, and can see how useful and powerful the framework can be. However I can also see that more complex tasks are (at the moment) beyond me and I really need to spend a lot of time working with the framework to understand how to implement different functionalities. For example, I am only trying to learn now how to build a basic form and process the data (using the MVC logic), I can't imagine when I will know how to connect to a database and implement a complex Ajax-based products detail page with shopping cart. So, from what I can see, Zend sounds so useful, but I will probably have a significant learning curve if I want to build this particular project under a framework, since frameworks in general are new to me.

Therefore, my question is this - can I "keep" Zend installed on my server, and use its capabilities for the simpler tasks (e.g. building a form).. but at the same time, I will include my own class file from the index.php file (this class file will be a php file that has all the small functions that I've used over the past few years and find useful for my projects).

Therefore, I will write some extra code in index.php to call my own class file and generate an object,
[CODE[include('../my_general_class_file.php');
$conn = new MyGeneralClassFile;[/code]

The $conn variable will therefore be available for my scripts, whether these scripts will be developed in the way I'm used to (i.e. using php include files that will be included via index.php) or if necessary the $conn variable will also be able to be accessed as a global variable in the Zend class files that I build in the future.

Does anyone have any comments on this or any recommendations? The point is, I don't have the time to fully work on Zend for this particular project, yet I want to "keep" Zend installed and ready so that I can use it for particular tasks for learning, eventually using more and more of the framework as I become more familiar with it.

Many thanks!