With the 2007.2 release of eZ Components comes a new component: Tree. This component enables you to create, manipulate and query tree structures in many ways. In addition to its basic functionality, the component also enables you to render the tree structure in different ways, with different visualizers. In this article, we will render output from an XML tree definition in order to create a nice menu using the Yahoo! User Interface library.

This is a German publication, we hope that an English translation will soon be available. The abstract follows in German: "Mit eZ Components erreicht zum ersten Mal eine professionelle Komponenten-Bibliothek die PHP-Gemeinde. Die hochqualitativen PHP-5-Bausteine lassen sich in beliebige Anwendungen und jedes Framework integrieren. Neben Komponenten zur Datenbankabstraktion sind unter anderem auch eine modulare Template-Engine, verschiedene Pakete zur Grafikbearbeitung, Datenvisualisierung (Charts) oder zur Realisierung von Plug-In-Architekturen (SignalSlot) im Angebot. Insgesamt stellt eZ Components zurzeit 26 Komponenten und 7 Tie-In-Komponenten zur Verfügung."

In this second part of the Introduction to eZ Components series the user is taken a little deeper into the eZ system by advancing the templating techniques from part 1, and introducing the UserInput Component by guiding the user through the process of creating a working contact form and the validation procedures that this requires to ensure security. Once again the tutorial flows in a step-by-step manner and includes extensive example code to get the user started.