I found my first real dislike / flaw in the Zend framework; it was easily fixed thanks to a write-up that I found online, but still annoying.

It appears that in the database adapter for mysqli within the ZF the use of a socket for your connection rather than directly from host was not permitted. There is an simple solution that I found at This website, and after making these adjustments to the zend library everything works fine.

The fix is as simple as adding $socket to an array that is then passed to the ZF connection protocol. I am very curious as to why the ZF team left out socket from the connection string for mysqli and not for other database adapters.