Jaguar

Yes, it works for YOU, but what about the person after you? (Assuming you're in a business setting.) There's actually a chance whoever comes after you will have experience with one of the popular frameworks. There is zero chance they will have experience with your custom framework. I inherited a custom framework at my job. I wish the person or persons before me had just used an open source framework. The popular open source frameworks (Cake, Zend, CI, etc.) are better documented and more thoroughly tested.

Use Zend_Db_Table, not Zend_Db_Table_Abstract (e.g. "$db = Zend_Db_Table::getDefaultAdapter();")

Do you have your the application environment defined? Assuming you're using the structure created by Zend_Tool, then a quick way and easy way to set it is to open up public/index.php and at the very top add define('APPLICATION_ENV', 'development'); Just make sure to remove that line when you are done testing. Also make sure you have error reporting turned on in the php.ini file.