Introduction to Yii2 Framework

Introduction to Yii2 Framework

What is Yii?

Yii is a high performance, component-based PHP framework for rapidly developing modern Web applications.

What is Yii2?

Yii currently has two major versions available: 1.1 and 2.0. Version 1.1 is the old generation and is now in maintenance mode. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of Yii, adopting the latest technologies and protocols, including Composer, PSR, namespaces, traits, and so forth.

Yii2 was under development for more than a year. As it is mentioned in official documentation, Yii2 is a complete rewrite of Yii1.1.

What are the major changes in Yii2?

PHP Version

One of the basic and most important changes in Yii2 is Yii 2.0 requires PHP 5.4.0 or above. Yii2 is built using most of latest features provided in PHP release version 5.4.0.  Make sure your server is running PHP version 5.4.0 or above before choosing Yii2.

Introduction of Namespaces

From PHP version 5.3.0, Namespaces were introduced in PHP programming. Due to the large number of libraries for PHP, the chances of name collision in different libraries became a real problem. Namespaces will help us to remove such problems. Namespaces are just like a folder which groups the files for a library.

Yii2 and Namespaces

Yii2 is built completely using namespaces. So we have to be familiar with using namespace in PHP programming in order work with Yii2. Here is good tutorial for how to use namespaces in PHP. Once you are ready to work with namespaces you are almost good to start development in Yii2 framework.

Integration with Bootstrap

Like the close integration with jQuery in Yii 1.1, Yii 2 is having a close integration with Bootstrap HTML Framework. Infact all the widgets are modified so that we can customize the html properties of those widgets in order to match the bootstrap structure. This will be very useful for modern web application development because most of the designs are now based on bootstrap html framework.

Yii2 Basic and Yii2 Advance

Yii2 framework is available in two templates, first one is basic and the other is advanced. Usually most of the projects will require only the basic template unless you really want to use advanced template. Advanced template provide multiple tires of application with individual application files sharing some common configuration. Basically the advanced template will help to create multiple application with sharing some common config such as db configuration. This helps us to create and application for frontend and a separate application for the backend. This is not required for most of the projects.

Structure of Yii 2 Framwork Files

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assets/             contains assets definition   commands/           contains console commands (controllers)   config/             contains application configurations   controllers/        contains Web controller classes   mail/               contains view files for e-mails   models/             contains model classes   runtime/            contains files generated during runtime   tests/              contains various tests for the basic application   vendor/             contains dependent 3rd-party packages   views/              contains view files for the Web application   web/                contains the entry script and Web resources

Unlike with Yii 1, standard installations of Yii 2 results in both the framework and an application skeleton being downloaded and installed. The core framework files are stored in the vendors folder.

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