specializing in digital media technologies

I have three decent-size Web sites to do in 2009, so I thought I might try using a PHP framework for the first time, instead of coding everything from scratch. I’ve used Ruby on Rails for Web development before, so I’m comfortable with frameworks and the MVC architecture, but I wanted to educate myself on PHP frameworks. After researching a handful of frameworks, and after an unsatisfying attempt to use Zend Framework, I finally settled on, and really came to appreciate the Yii Framework. The Yii Framework is still quite new, and the documentation isn’t expansive, but it works so well that it’s still quite easy to use. In this first of several posts on the Yii Framework, I just discuss setting up and testing Yii. (continue reading…)

Many, many moons ago I wrote a post introducing the Yii framework. It’s a framework for creating Web applications using PHP 5 (or greater) that I’ve really liked since I originally started with it. Ruby on Rails was the first Web development framework I personally used (back in 2005) and Zend was the first PHP framework. I love the former, and Yii is quite like it in many ways, but I never really took to Zend. In that first post, I discussed just downloading and testing Yii; here I’ll walk through creating the beginnings of a Web application. (continue reading…)

This is the third post in my series on Yii, my favorite PHP framework. In the first, I show how to download and test the framework itself. In the second, I show how to create a basic Web application. In this post, I discuss how you’ll want to configure your Yii-based application, including handling errors, adding components, and establishing a database connection. This post does assume you have an existing application to work with; if you don’t, follow the steps in the previous two posts.

(continue reading…)