If you haven’t yet seen it, Steven O’Brien wrote an in-depth series of articles on the Yii framework’s component architecture, posted at phpmaster. In the series, O’Brien looks at the CComponent base class in detail. Every class in Yii is an extension of CComponent, so understanding what it brings to the table can be quite useful to the Yii developer. Part 1 looks at the classes key properties and methods. Part 2 discusses events. And part 3 explains the behaviors. If you’re using Yii, it’s worth reading these to better understand what’s going on at the fundamental level.