, I walk through some configuration options. In this post, I want to discuss the database design that will be the foundation for the Yii application I’m demonstrating (in the subsequent four posts). The specific example will be a classic employees-departments application, with each employee in one department. This post does assume you have an existing Yii application to work with, most likely by following the steps in my previous posts.

(Note: In October 2010, I’ve updated this entire series to reflect changes in Yii since this series was written, and to take into account feedback provided through the comments. Some outdated material will be crossed out, but left in to reflect how things have changed since the series was begun in June 2009.)

, I show how to create a basic Web application. The end of that post also discusses the files and folders in the application directory. You’ll want to be familiar with those as you go forward. In this post, I discuss how you’ll want to configure your Yii-based application, including handling errors, adding components, and establishing a database connection. This post does assume you have an existing application to work with; if you don’t, follow the steps in the previous two posts.

(Note: In October 2010, I’ve updated this entire series to reflect changes in Yii since this series was written, and to take into account feedback provided through the comments. Some outdated material will be crossed out, but left in to reflect how things have changed since the series was begun in June 2009.)

. It’s a framework for creating Web applications using PHP 5 (or greater) that I’ve really liked since I originally started with it. Ruby on Rails was the first Web development framework I personally used (back in 2005) and Zend was the first PHP framework. I love the former, and Yii is quite like it in many ways, but I never really took to Zend. In that first post, I discussed just downloading and testing Yii; here I’ll walk through creating the beginnings of a Web application.

(Note: In October 2010, I’ve updated this entire series to reflect changes in Yii since this series was written, and to take into account feedback provided through the comments. Some outdated material will be crossed out, but left in to reflect how things have changed since the series was begun in June 2009.)

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Blog => Understanding MVC
• In the Forum => Being Self-Taught
• On the Web => Best of Open Source Software Awards
• On the Web => Git: Your New Best Friend
• On the Web => Titanium Desktop
• Q&A => How do I improve my programming skills?
• Q&A => How do you organize your code library?
• What is Larry Thinking? => Mac’s Snow Leopard Release
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => E-commerce, Flex, JavaScript

About this Newsletter

Just a basic, getting-this-going-again newsletter, with some suggestions for things you could check out and some updates on what I’m up to. The next newsletter will have a giveaway (my PHP for the Web book, plus some foreign language editions). As always, thanks for reading and please do let me know what comments and questions you have!

On the Blog => Understanding MVC

I’ve recently wrapped up two Web sites that used the Yii framework (for PHP) and have been meaning to write about various Yii-related topics in my blog. But first, I figured it’d be worthwhile to add some thoughts on the MVC (Model, View, Controller) design pattern, to give a sense of overall architecture. The first of three posts on that topic can be found here. Specific Yii posts should be going up soon.

Rather big news has just been announced by Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers: Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Currently, all domain names must be written using the Latin alphabet, meaning that most of the world is entering URLs in their non-native language. Presumably, if you’re reading this, you’re comfortable with English; Now just imagine if every time you went online you had to type URLs in Chinese, Arabic, or Russian! Well, that’s going to change over the next year, as support for domain names in those three languages (to start) will be added to DNS (Domain Name System). This is a significant and welcome change. For more information, see the Icann site or this article at the BBC.

ZendCon, a Zend/PHP Conference happened last week in San Jose, California. Although I didn’t attend, I’ve been reading about the conference, including this brief article informally comparing the different frameworks. One point I thought particularly interesting is that the Zend person suggested the people using other frameworks were also likely to be using Zend. As for myself, I’m pretty happy with Yii these days, but still use Zend’s Lucene search module on sites, incorporating it into Yii. So in my experience, I’d rather not use Zend for a whole project, but happily take on those pieces that I do need. I’m not sure what that says about a framework…

ever since! Anyway, the article talks about how PHP 6 stresses Unicode support, which is what I focus on in the PHP 6 sections of my book. It’s a big, radical change, that takes a lot of work to get right. A couple of other expected features in PHP 6 are mentioned as well.