In the field of chemical sensors, porphyrinoids have been demonstrated to be an excellent sensing materials for target applications in medical diagnosis, food control, and environmental monitoring. These macrocycles offer a wide range of interaction mechanisms that can be exploited to bind host molecules either airborne or in solution and their properties can be finely tuned by synthetic modifications. A further opportunity to improve the performances of porphyrin is represented by their combination with inorganic materials. Porphyrins have been frequently used to functionalize other molecular structures or surfaces. The optical properties of porphyrins prompted the study of functionalized wide band gap semiconductors for solar cell developments. Recently, we have been interested in the exploitation of porphyrin grafted onto ZnO nanoparticles for sensor applications. The results obtained showed that the arrangement of porphyrins onto ZnO greatly affected the sensing properties. In the present work, we summarise our recent results, showing a promising route for chemical sensors applications.