I was trying to step through the Zend Framework Quickstart for the first time. I got to the Create an Error Controller & View step. Instead of the Error Controller I was just getting 404s instead. Turns out my virtual server’s host settings had .htaccess files disabled.
I will not go into the details of this since everyone’s configuration is different but the following line in my virtual host file resolved this issue and my .htaccess file is being used by the server now and my error controller is working as expected:
AllowOverride All