Yii

The good folks at Yii dropped their latest framework release, 1.1.9, on January 1 of this year. Updating my applications use to this new framework was comically simple thanks to a small trick: using a symbolic link to reference the framework.

Whether you're downloading Yii for the first time, or upgrading to the latest Yii framework, you can create a symbolic link in your web root directory like this:

ln -s yii-1.1.9.r3527/ yii

Also update the following webapp files and replace each reference to the hard link with a reference to the symbolic link:

• /webapp/index.php
• /webapp/index-test.php
• /webapp/protected/yiic.php
• /webapp/protected/tests/bootstrap.php

Now here's where this comes in handy: when you're ready to upgrade to a new Yii framework, simply download it and unzip it in your web root, and update the symbolic to point to the new framework. Boom, thirty seconds, you've upgraded.

(Of course it's only this easy if you haven't hacked any core framwework files. You haven't hacked any core framework files, right?)

So you've got your clean Yii installation^*...now what? Frequently the next step is adding support for users and some sort of permissioning schema. The official Yii guide to Authentication and Authorization is a very comprehensive and important piece of documentation — please do take the hour or so necessary to read it and try to understand it. You could skip it, of course, and just use the following steps to get your app working, but you'd really be missing out, especially if you're new to Yii, new to object-oriented PHP, or just new to authentication/authorization methodologies.

Anyone could roll his own user and permissioning framework, but luckily there are two well-supported Yii extensions for this: yii-user and rights. Both come with installation instructions, but I'm writing it all out in steps for easy reference.

By the way, I've created a github repository with a working version of my installation. You can grab it here, or just clone it:

git clone git@github.com:benjaminlhaas/Yii-with-Users-and-Rights.git

If you use this, you'll need to run the two migration scripts in the webapp/protected/migrations directory and probably change some directory permissions. Check out the README in the root.

If you still want to install yii-users and rights step-by-step, here are the instructions:

I've been working with the Yii Framework for a few months now, and have been massively impressed so far. The amount of foresight that went into the design and architecture of this framework is mind boggling, and I keep getting reminded of this over and over again when I'm trying to get a very specific task done, and I learn that a well-documented, simple method or class already exists expressly for this purpose. I'm really surprised that Yii hasn't been getting a lot of chatter in the development community (at least from the people I've been listening to).

I've thrown together a few Yii applications so far, and I thought I would document a few installation/configuration processes for my benefit, and for anyone else who stumbles across this. All of this is available in disparate locations, including the official Yii reference, but I wanted to list things out as simply as possible, detailing how I got it to work for my setup.