There needs to be a plugin interface for the global operations in Zend_Form. For init(), there needs to be a preInit() and postInit() method. A common situation for users is to override the decorators globally. Currently that means calling {{setElementDecorators()}} after adding the form elements:

 
class My_Login_Form extends Zend_Form
{
  init()
  {
    //add elements
    //call setElementDecorators
  }
}

A more convenient way that would fit with the flexible nature of Zend_Form would be to provide a plugin interface for the init() method. So the user could create a global wrapper class, My_Form and then provide instructions for all forms.

class My_Form extends Zend_Form
{
  preInit()
  {
    //set global form defaults, charset, etc.
  }

  init()
  {
     //this gets run if the extending class doesn't have an init() method
     parent::init();
  }


  postInit()
  {
     //here we can do stuff after all the fields are added with init
     
  }

  preValidate()
  {
    //add a default validator 
   }

  postValidate()
  {
 
  }

}

Then the user could extend this class for all forms instead of Zend_Form. If they didn't want the default for the form they could locally override postInit():

class My_Login_Form extends My_Form
{
    init()
    {
      //add fields, postInit() will apply default decorators to all with setElementDecorators()
    }

}

class My_Password_Form extends My_Form
{
   init()
   {
      //add fields
   }

   postInit()
   {
     //override default decorator here because we don't want it.
   }
}

This would add a great deal of flexibility and would only take about 6 lines of code in Zend Form.