Once your controller has assigned variables and called render(),
Zend_View then includes the requested view script and executes
it "inside" the scope of the Zend_View instance. Therefore,
in your view scripts, references to $this actually point to the
Zend_View instance itself.
Variables assigned to the view from the controller are referred to as instance properties. For example, if the controller were to assign a variable 'something', you would refer to it as $this->something in the view script. (This allows you to keep track of which values were assigned to the script, and which are internal to the script itself.)
By way of reminder, here is the example view script from the
Zend_View introduction.
<?php if ($this->books): ?>
<!-- A table of some books. -->
<table>
<tr>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Title</th>
</tr>
<?php foreach ($this->books as $key => $val): ?>
<tr>
<td><?php echo $this->escape($val['author']) ?></td>
<td><?php echo $this->escape($val['title']) ?></td>
</tr>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</table>
<?php else: ?>
<p>There are no books to display.</p>
<?php endif;?>