Zend Framework MVC uses layouts and views to render pages in the web browser; the overall page content is controlled by the layout specification, and the view level information is contained in the views. The concept is to minimize the amount of redundant HTML code that needs to be generated for each of these views.
By using layouts, the application can have a consistent user interface, which is also easy to customize; the views offer the flexibility to modify the targeted content and allow customization to the maximum possible extent. This is also known as two-step view.
When a new view is generated, the appropriate layout is identified from the layout definitions in the view_manager
configuration and the view is rendered with that layout.
The preceding schematic explains how the layout and view are combined to form an HTML page, so for each and every view, the view part changes and the layout part remains static.