Building a site in 15 minutesWith the Yii Framework

What is Yii?

• MVC Framework– Model, View, Controller

• PHP• Built to be fast, secure and professional– Faster than Cake, Codeigniter, Zend1

• Lots of plumbing already in place– Build a site quickly, don’t reinvent the wheel

• Gii GUI for quickly creating application scaffolding– Web-based code generation

1http://www.yiiframework.com/performance/

How do we start?

• Basic VM image provided – run with VirtualBox– Already set-up : CentOS 6, Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Yii

• Some initial personlisation– Login as root, (password yii)– Create a user

• useradd -G wheel akelk• passwd akelk• visudo

• Make sure wheel can run sudo– Login as yourself (using putty)

Creating our site with Yii

• Run yiic– Directory already in place, navigate to /var/www/html/yiisite– Initially we run using sudo as all files are owned by nginx– sudo ../../yii/framework/yiic webapp .

– Then we’ll change ownership and give ourselves write permissions for easier development purposes

– sudo chown -R nginx:wheel .; sudo chmod -R g+w .

• Now we’re ready to visit our site– Fire up your favourite browser– Visit the main Yii URL (e.g. http://192.168.0.107/)– Explore the site

Configuring our site

• Main config file is in protected/config/main.php– Set up access to the mysql database

• 'db'=>array( 'connectionString' => 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=iproperty', 'emulatePrepare' => true, 'username' => 'iproperty', 'password' => 'iproperty', 'charset' => 'utf8',),

– Enable the Gii GUI• 'modules'=>array(

'gii'=>array( 'class'=>'system.gii.GiiModule', 'password'=>'iproperty', 'ipFilters'=>array('127.0.0.1','::1','192.168.*'), ),),

Create the scaffolding

• Naïve SQL schema– CREATE TABLE `listing` (

`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `title` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `description` text, `state` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, `area` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, `price` decimal(10,0) DEFAULT NULL, `status` char(1) DEFAULT NULL, `issale` tinyint(1) DEFAULT NULL, `isrent` tinyint(1) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`)) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

• Fire up gii and login– http://192.168.0.107/index.php?r=gii– Password is iproperty

• Create model (named listing)• Create CRUD (using Listing model and listing controller)

Try it out

• Add a new listing or two– Using the create action

• View the listings– Using the view action

• Manage listings– Using the manage action

• But no search?– Only accessible via manage when you’re logged in– Let’s create one!

Extending our site

• Create a search action– Very similar to admin

• Allow access to all– Edit the accessRules method

• Create a view to render it– Similar to admin but use a CLinkColumn for the grid display– array(

'class'=>'CLinkColumn', 'urlExpression'=> 'Yii::app()->createUrl("listing/view",array("id"=>$data->id))',),

– Re-use _search.php from the admin action

Review

• For simple CRUD, all you need is a sensible database schema, ActiveRecord and Gii; relationships will help you navigate between objects.

• You can add new actions – remember to keep the controllers skinny, the models fat

• There’s loads of helper classes:– HTTP Responses (including errors)– Caching (File, MemCache, Opcode caching)– Data structures (Maps, Iterators, Queues)– Validators (String, URL, Number, Email, etc)– Web widgets (grids, forms, inputs)– Web services (SOAP, REST)– I18n (Translating, Messages, Date formats, etc)

• Read the documentation