Views in Zend Framework are written in plain old PHP. View scripts are placed in application/views/scripts/, where they are further categorized using the controller names. In our case, we have an IndexController and an ErrorController, and thus we have corresponding index/ and error/ subdirectories within our view scripts directory. Within these subdirectories, you will then find and create view scripts that correspond to each controller action exposed; in the default case, we thus have the view scripts index/index.phtml and error/error.phtml.

View scripts may contain any markup you want, and use the <?php opening tag and ?> closing tag to insert PHP directives.

The following is what we install by default for the index/index.phtml view script:

<!-- application/views/scripts/index/index.phtml -->
<style>

    a:link,
    a:visited
    {
        color: #0398CA;
    }

    span#zf-name
    {
        color: #91BE3F;
    }

    div#welcome
    {
        color: #FFFFFF;
        background-image: url(http://framework.zend.com/images/bkg_header.jpg);
        width:  600px;
        height: 400px;
        border: 2px solid #444444;
        overflow: hidden;
        text-align: center;
    }

    div#more-information
    {
        background-image: url(http://framework.zend.com/images/bkg_body-bottom.gif);
        height: 100%;
    }

</style>
<div id="welcome">
    <h1>Welcome to the <span id="zf-name">Zend Framework!</span><h1 />
    <h3>This is your project's main page<h3 />
    <div id="more-information">
        <p>
            <img src="http://framework.zend.com/images/PoweredBy_ZF_4LightBG.png" />
        </p>

        <p>
            Helpful Links: <br />
            <a href="http://framework.zend.com/">Zend Framework Website</a> |
            <a href="http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/">Zend Framework
                Manual</a>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>

The error/error.phtml view script is slightly more interesting as it uses some PHP conditionals: