Let’s look at a different way of rendering view files: using static pages. The difference between a static page and a standard page in the site is that the static page does not change based upon any input. In other words, a dynamic page might display information based upon a provided model instance, but a static page just displays some hard-coded HTML (in theory).

This is an excerpt from Chapter 7, “Working with Controllers,” of " The Yii Book".

Nettuts+ recently posted " HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know – Part 1" by Pavan Podila. This is the first part of a two-part article, covering what every Web developer ought to know about the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is a nicely detailed, but understandable, article that truly every Web developer should read. (Well, if you’re not familiar with HTTP in some detail already.)

My first book, PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, came out about 12 years ago now (it covered both PHP 3 and 4!). In the dozen years since then, I’ve written 22 more books (including revisions), with three different publishers. About 2-3 years ago, I first started thinking about self-publishing a book, and as of Fall 2012, am finally doing so with The Yii Book. I occasionally get asked, probably by people that also want to self-publish, about the tools I’m using for writing and self-publishing this book: technically speaking, how am I doing it? The introduction to the book does discuss this, but as not everyone has purchased the book, I thought I’d write up my process.

tl;dr version: I use Markdown, Scrivener, Pandoc, and Calibre.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What is Larry Thinking => The Myths of Going Big
• Q&A => How do I get started with a new site?
• Q&A => Who should I use for my hosting?
• Q&A => What kind of infrastructure does a big site need?
• On the Blog => How to Pick a Data Center
• On the Web => Scaling Lessons Learned at Dropbox
• On the Web => Useful Services
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “The Yii Book” version 0.6 Update Posted

Content decorators are a less heralded but interesting feature of the Yii framework. Content decorators allow you to hijack the view rendering process and add some additional stuff around the view file being rendered. In this excerpt from Chapter 7, “Working with Controllers,” of " The Yii Book", I’ll explain what content decorators are and how you use them. (This does assume you have some familiarity with Yii and how it renders the complete layout.)

This is an excerpt from Chapter 6, “Working with Views,” of " The Yii Book".