Hector Virgen gave some hints about how to pass object into partial views and partial loops;
You can pass objects to partials, just pass them in an array:
<?= $this->partial('mypartial.phtml', array('topic' => $topic')) ?>
The partial helper will take the keys of that array and create view vars out of them, so you can access it like this from within the partial:
<?= $this->topic->getDescription() ?>
If you want to use objects with a partial loop, you can call setObjectKey() on the partialLoop helper and pass in an array of objects:
<?= $this-partialLoop()->setObjectKey('topic')
->partialLoop('mypartial.phtml', $topics) ?>
Editors remark: Easy once you seen it done 🙂