Would it bankrupt the creators of Zend Framework to hire a competent technical writer and properly document it? Even better, my kingdom if Matthew Weier O'Phinney spent even half the time he does commenting on external examples, tutorials, and critiques, and instead wrote better tutorials, examples, and overall Zend Framework documentation.

For such a promising and capable system, the current vaguery, citeless inferences, and incomplete (if not outdated) examples from the "Programmers Reference Guide" is absolutely killing me and my production timeline.

I can't be the only one who's dealt with this.

/rant

I can understand your frustration, but the Zend Framework is developing at a rather rapid pace and there is a finite number of people who are working on the project.

From what I've seen they document the API and Developer's Reference the best they can, and I do find it quite helpful.

I agree that some things aren't as clear or as concise as they probably could be, but perhaps asking a specific question would better serve your needs and even get you the answer you desire.

I am still struggling to completely understand Zend_Form as I am sure many out there are, but I know it will take time and as I get a specific question, I ask it.

With regards to your timeline, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your project plan and account for the "learning curve" within it. I do that with anything "shiny and new" that is going to be part of the implementation and it works out quite well.

Many of the examples out there are for pre-ZF 1.5. ZF 1.5 is a pretty major release which includes, Zend_Layout and Zend_Form just to name a couple of items. More and more examples are becoming available as people get a chance to use 1.5. So, please hang in there, it will get better with time.

Remember, ZF is free, and I am sure that if you would like to volunteer your time to assist them in the documentation department they would love for you to do so.

The reference guide does feel a bit abstract for me, i first have to find a tutorial that explains what a component does and how to incorporate it into a real example, then i read the reference guide about what methods are available, then i google to find out how to actually use the method... The #zftalk channel helps a bit but half of the time i just fail to find the info i need to make any headway.

Zf looks very good and thought thru but it will be hard to use it for anything other than personal projects because i cant even estimate the googling hours needed to use it for a consulting project.

Still i think its well worth learning, are there any good books that cover zf1.5 on the horizon?