yii framework tutorial for beginners

yii framework tutorial for beginners

This is a short tutorial that will help you understand how to develop yourself the well known .Hello
World!. demo, included with the release.
Unlike the demo release, though, we will implement the demo as though it was a complete new
application you are developing.
We will assume you already have the Yii framework installed, up and running, if not,
We will use the powerful yiic tool which can be used to automate code creation for several
purposes. We assume that YiiRoot is the directory where Yii is installed.

Run yiic on the command line as follows:
% YiiRoot/framework/yiic webapp WebRoot/helloworld
Note: When running yiic on Mac OS, Linux or Unix, you may need to change the
permission of the yiic file so that it is executable. You may also use php
YiiRoot/framework/yiic.php to replace yiic. Make also sure your user hasd
permission to create directories under WebRoot.
Without writing a single line of code, we can test drive our first Yii application by accessing the
following URL in a Web browser:

http://hostname/helloworld/index.php

Note: If you followed the installation guide, in order to check your server meets the necessary
Requirements, your WebRoot will probably be the YiiRoot. This is a bad practice, the
Framework files should not be exposed to web access, only your application files should; this
Will not be a problem to continue this tutorial.
If everything worked you should get something like this:
And this should be the directory structure that the yiic tool created under your application directory:
WebRoot/helloworld.
helloworld/
index.php Web application entry script file
assets/ containing published resource files
css/ containing CSS files
images/ containing image files
themes/ containing application themes
protected/ containing protected application files
yiic yiic command line script
yiic.bat yiic command line script for Windows
commands/ containing customized ‘yiic’ commands
shell/ containing customized ‘yiic shell’ commands
components/ containing reusable user components
MainMenu.php the ‘MainMenu’ widget class
Identity.php the ‘Identity’ class used for authentication
views/ containing view files for widgets
mainMenu.php the view file for ‘MainMenu’ widget
config/ containing configuration files
console.php the console application configuration
main.php the Web application configuration
controllers/ containing controller class files
SiteController.php the default controller class
extensions/ containing third-party extensions
messages/ containing translated messages
models/ containing model class files
LoginForm.php the form model for ‘login’ action
ContactForm.php the form model for ‘contact’ action
runtime/ containing temporarily generated files
views/ containing controller view and layout files
layouts/ containing layout view files
main.php the default layout for all views
site/ containing view files for the ‘site’ controller
contact.php the view for ‘contact’ action
index.php the view for ‘index’ action
login.php the view for ‘login’ action
system/ containing system view files
If you aren’t familiar with MVC design pattern you should have a look at the corresponding section
under the Yii framework guide, in general, M (the model) deal with data and business rules (typically
DB interaction), V (the view) is used to deal with user-interaction (displaying data, forms, pages), C
(the controller) manages the communication between the model and the view.
In this case what we need to look for is the default controller class which can be found at: WebRoot/
helloworld/protected/controllers and it’s called: SiteController.php.
Just for the purpose of this tutorial we’ll delete the file, so go ahead and delete it (at this point your
web application will not work anymore); then open a text editor of your choice, we need to recreate the
default controller.
A controller is a php class, its methods are commonly called .actions. and they usually define the
possible user actions when interacting or visiting a web page. Yii controllers all need to extend the
framework controller class which is called CController.
) and save your
new file as: WebRoot/helloworld/protected/controllers/SiteController.php
Access your application and…
Hello World
At this point your tutorial would be done, although, we can expand it just a little more in order to
obtain the same result but use a view instead. In fact, the procedure used for this demo does not reflect
the standard development procedures. In my experience with MVC I learned that you never want a
controller output user data (our echo), the controller should, as we said before, be just a mean of
communication between the model and the view. In this case, a model is obviously not needed as no
data needs to be fetched from a DB or a file, no business logic is needed.
The fact that no communication is needed between our view and our model (no model) doesn’t
mean the controller won’t do anything, our default action (actionIndex) will change to do one simple
thing: render the view. That can be achieved by simply doing this:
public function actionIndex()
{
$this->render(‘index’);
}
The .render(). method comes from the Ccontroller class that we extended and its work is to
render a view, in this case we are telling it to dender the .index. view. Which we’ll create right now.
Save the controller and open a new file in the text editor and type:
Hello World!
Save the file as WebRoot/helloworld/protected/views/site/index.php overwriting the current
index.php which is already placed there.
We’ll do a small hack here which I will explain later on: rename the directory:
WebRoot/helloworld/protected/views/layouts
to
WebRoot/helloworld/protected/views/layouts-backup
Then access your page and there you are, same result, a bit prettier, using a view.
Happy Yiiing!
Notes
By default yii applications make use of the default layout file which is called main.php in the
layouts directory we renamed. The file contains a few elements like a header and a footer as
well as a .component. which is the menu we saw on top when first accessing our application.
Those parts were not needed for our application, the fastest way to remove them is to get rid
of the layout, or to edit it to whatever you want to.
The directory structure of our application is much fatter than the directory structure of the
demo under YiiRoot/demos/helloworld. You can actually skin it down to obtain a very similar
result although you have to pay attention when removing certain directories:
_ – the default demo doesn’t have views, we added our own index.php view, so the views
directory should not be removed (although you can remove the other views).
_ – you will always need the file WebRoot/helloworld/index.php, but the only directory
needed there is the .protected. directory.
_ – the default index.php file includes the default configuration file which is found at
WebRoot/helloworld/protected/config/main.php.

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About pramodhs

myself pramodh kumar yet another php developer from India and have worked on oops,procedural,yii framework,codeigniter,wordpress,joomla,api and more.

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