Some time back, I had written a couple of blog posts on authentication and authorization in Yii. As a comment to one of those posts, someone shared some code (also posted in the Yii forums) that requires a login to access any page. The interesting thing about this code is that it’s placed in the primary application configuration file, not within individual Controllers. The benefit to this approach is that a little bit of code can add authorization to your entire site, no matter how many Controllers you have. I’ll explain how to use this approach in this post, although keep in mind that it’s really best for situations where users must be logged in to access almost all of the site’s content. Continue Reading…
Archives For MySQL
On my most recent Yii-based Web site, I decided to use a custom Flash application for part of the back-end administration of the site. The justification was simple: what the administrator needed to do was a bit complicated; lots of information had to be available but the user interface had to remain uncluttered and natural. The specific Web site provided a way to create and take online quizzes. In a separate process, the administrator could add and edit questions. In the Flash-based process, the administrator could associate any number of questions with a quiz (actually, a pool of questions would be associated with a quiz and X number of random questions would be pulled from that pool). The main issue, from a user interface perspective, was how to display the questions in an intelligent way. With other examples, I might create a form for adding or editing quizzes and within that form, the questions would be listed within a dropdown menu (actually a SELECT menu that displayed and allowed for the selection of multiple options). However, with this particular example, there was no good way to display the questions in a SELECT menu. Each question had a unique primary key, of course, but that’s not very useful to the administrator. The questions did not have unique names (what name do you give a question?) and the best indicator of a question was its prompt, which would be HTML, possibly containing images and videos. So, again, how do I display possibly hundreds of questions in a meaningful way?
My solution was to show the list of questions by number and, when the admin clicks on a specific question, they’d see a preview of that question’s prompt (i.e., the HTML) in a separate interface. Now I’ve got three areas in my UI: one for adding or editing the other quiz attributes, one for listing every question, and a third for displaying the particulars of a single question. Given all this, I thought having the admin drag the questions from one area to another would be the best way to associate a question with a quiz. I could have done all this using jQuery (the JavaScript framework Yii uses by default), but that would have taken me days to figure out how to use jQuery in this way. On the other hand, I knew I could develop this using Flex (a framework for creating Flash applications) in no time. I just didn’t know how to get Yii and Flash to play ball. It turns out not to be that hard… Continue Reading…
I’ve just wrapped another project using the Yii framework (my fourth in the past year) and so I’ve got a few more topics to write about. I really like the Yii framework (obviously) and think it’s very accessible, but there are still things that take me some time to figure out, so those topics make for good blog posts! In this one, I’ll walk through what I had to do to cache the database schema using memcached. For that matter, I’ll explain why you’d want to do this in the first place… Continue Reading…
I am very pleased to say that I’ve just finished the rough draft of the Table of Contents for my forthcoming “E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, to be published by New Riders Fall 2010. I’ve been wanting to do this book for some time (and was supposed to do it last year) and readers have been asking for it for even longer, so I’m really excited to get going on it finally. Continue Reading…
Version 1.1.2 of the Yii framework came out a couple of weeks ago (May 2, 2010) and it’s main new feature is Gii. Gii is a Web-based alternative to the yiic command-line tool. Both yiic and Gii are used to generate code in existing Yii Web applications. For example, you create the database for a project, then use the command-line yiic tool to generate the shell of the project (its directory, configuration files, subdirectories, etc.), and then you would turn to Gii in the Web browser to create Model, Controller, and View files, along with the standard CRUD functionality. I’ll write more about Gii soon, but in the meantime, check out the previous Gii link or this part of the quickstart documentation.
