I've been working on a little PHP project lately, and to make things a bit easier on myself I decided to use an MVC framework. In the past I have worked a little with Zend Framework, and it is certainly a full featured framework, backed by Zend, the PHP company. But in my experience it has a very steep learning curve. In addition the many parts have great documentation if used in isolation, but the documentation of how the parts work together within an MVC framework is a bit lacking, and in addition I never did figure out how to get dates from the database to a form and back without jumping through a whole lot of hoops. I am sure that there is an easy way to do it, but I spent hours searching the internet, and found nothing.
I have also looked at Code Igniter. As much as Zend Framework is an industrial strength framework, Code Igniter is on the opposite side of the MVC framework ledger. About as light as a framework can be yet still be called a framework. I want a framework to provide at least some assistance. I don't want to have to completely define my own way to do things.
So I heard about Yii and decided to try it. Yii occupies the space somewhere between Code Igniter and Zend Framework. It is fairly responsive, yet contains database classes, form classes and several helpers, validators and filters built in. It also features a slick code generator called Gii which you can configure with your own templates. So far in my project I have had several things I wanted to do that were a bit unclear, or uncovered in the documentation. However, I found that the community around Yii is extremely helpful, and most of my questions already had answers either in the Yii forums or on StackOverflow.
Over the next couple of weeks I will post more of my findings about Yii here on my blog.
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