I’ve been writing quite a bit about the Yii framework for PHP lately and thought a listing of useful resources would be in order. Yii is still a relatively new framework, so there’s not a lot out there, but people are taking an interest in the framework and making a point to share what they learn, which is always a good sign. To start, there’s the stuff at Yii’s site:
- The Definitive Guide to Yii, which is a descriptive overview of most of Yii’s features. This is a very accessible way to get into Yii.
- The Yii Cookbook, with lots of useful little recipes. Great for learning how to expand your application.
- The Blog Tutorial, which walks through the creation of a blog using Yii. Easy to follow, but not applicable to everything you’ll do.
- Yii Framework Class Reference, which details every class in the framework. This is the ultimate source for using the framework from a syntax perspective, but isn’t as easy to read and apply to your own code.
- The Yii Forum, for help and seeing what other people are doing.
All of the above are obviously linked on Yii’s own documentation page. That page also lists a Yii Cheat Sheet, plus some screen- and podcasts.
In working with Yii, I’ve also come across these writings:
Jonah’s Thoughts on PHP and Things Related has a handful of posts on Yii. They’re all from late-2008 and early-2009, so they’re getting to be a bit outdated but are still worth a read.
Kevin Korb has quite a few posts on Yii, specifically Yii+MySQL, plus a video tutorial on installing Yii on Mac OS X.
There’s a fairly long tutorial for beginners at SterlingSavvy.com.
My recommendation would be to start with the Definitive Guide, then move onto the other sources to help get a sense of a real-world use of those ideas.
