Without much formality (aside from the Shakespeare), I’d like to share four bits of Yii-related news:
- The Release of Yii 2
- Progress on “The Yii Book”
- Looking ahead to “The Yii 2 Book” (aka, the second edition)
- An online Yii 2 presentation I’m doing this Thursday, October 23, 2014 for Nomad PHP
First, and most importantly, in case you missed it, Yii 2 was released on October 12th. This took a lot of work from a number of people, and is very exciting. Yii 2 is a great update for an already excellent framework.
As for “The Yii Book“, there were three chapters left that were not covered in the last release (version 0.9 of the book). I’ve since finished Chapter 24, “Shipping Your Project”. Just a couple of days ago, I finished the code for Chapter 22, which is a fairly complete CMS/blog example. Basically it fleshes out the example that was used frequently in the book. I still have to write up an explanation of the code and development steps, but that’s a fairly minor thing to do (coming up with the examples, code, and plan for what you’ll write about in a chapter is the hardest part). In the meantime, I’ve posted that code to GitHub, and you can download it there.
I’ll do the same for Chapter 23, which is the e-commerce example: write the code first, share it on GitHub, and then write the actual chapter. I just yesterday figured out what my example is going to be, which is great to finally get to. I’ll talk about that separately.
So…the immediate plan for completing the first edition of the book:
- Write out code for Chapter 23.
- Share that code.
- Write out Chapters 22 & 23 (explaining the code).
- Publish the complete 1.0 version of “The Yii Book”.
Then, I start on the Yii 2 version! Originally my plan was to update the entire book for Yii 2 and publish it all at once. (Again, this will be a free update for anyone that purchased the book already.) I may still do that, but it’ll depend upon how long it takes. Rewrites are always much, much faster than the first edition, so it absolutely won’t take me 2 years! (Ugh, so sorry about that!) Nothing is written in stone right now, but if it looks like I can update the entire book in one fell swoop, and have that done by, say, February 2015, I’ll probably go that route. If that doesn’t seem feasible, I’ll probably release the revision in 4-6 chapter blocks.
I’m going to start putting more of my public code into GitHub, and will do that for the examples in “The Yii 2 Book”, too. I may start by updating the code examples from Chapters 22 & 23 first, just to give a great perspective on the differences between the two versions.
Finally, this Thursday, October 23, 2014, I’m giving an online presentation on Yii 2 for Nomad PHP, titled “Faster Web Development with Yii Framework 2”. In this presentation, I’ll be introducing the Yii framework in general, and version 2 in particular. Click the “Faster Web Development with Yii Framework 2” link for an introduction to the presentation. This is a paid event, put on by Nomad PHP, but the cost is only $15, for either live attendance or a video afterwards.
