it may seem like a dumb question because I feel like it is when asking it but I can't find anything about it in the doc.
I need to put a form in the header of my website that appears in all pages. I need that form to be able to be submitted in every page (no surprise here).
I can display my form via the layout function of Zend Framework, but I can't find the equivalent for the back-end of the website to be able to treat it at only one place, site-wide.
I thought it would be possible to put the form validation in the bootstrap but it doesn't seem like it.
Did I miss something or do I have to, at least, put the form validation in all init() function of all my controllers ?
take a look at the plugin documentation
You can write a plugin that handles your request. If you need to have your form processed before any other actions take place, I suggest you use the dispatchLoopStartup() hook.
You should avoid predispatch and postdispatch in this case, because those hooks are called multiple times if you proces multiple actions (by using _forward for instance)