Yii2 by Example

Develop complete web applications from scratch through practical examples and tips for beginners and more advanced users

About This Book

• Improve your programming experience and become a full stack developer
• Master real-life web applications, and create and manage four different projects
• Step-by-step guidance to develop real-world web applications smoothly

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who wants to discover and explore Yii Framework. Basic programming experience with PHP and object oriented programming is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Understand basic concepts, along with the installation and customization of Yii
• Discover models, controllers, and views-concepts applied in a web context-and how they are employed in Yii
• Use ActiveRecord to manipulate a database
• Add access control to your web application through authentication and authorization
• Install and customize an advanced template for multiple applications in the same project
• Create a RESTful Web Service to allow remote access to data
• Develop a console application to launch a command in the console as an automated task (cron job)
• Make code reusable through widgets and components and localize text messages to make a multilanguage web app

In Detail

Yii is a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications. It provides fast, secure, and professional features to create robust projects, however, this rapid development requires the ability to organize common tasks together to build a complete application. It's all too easy to get confused; this is where this book comes in.

This book contains a series of practical project examples for developers starting from scratch. Each section contains the most relevant theories for every topic as you walk through developing each project, focusing on key aspects that commonly confuse users.

The book starts with all the framework's basic concepts, such as controllers and views, to introduce you to Yii and creating your first application, a simple news reader. You will be learn to configure URL rules to make a pretty URL, essential for search engine optimization. Next, you will walk through Model and ActiveRecord, key concepts in database interaction.

The second application you will develop is a reservation system that allows you to manage rooms, customers, and reservations. For this, you will use database connection through SQL and ActiveRecord. More complex than the first one, this application will introduce you to the advanced template of Yii 2, splitting the app into two parts: a frontend for all visitors and a backend for the admin. Finally, you will move on to the last two applications: one that allows connections from remote clients, through RESTful components of Yii 2, and another that creates and organizes automatic tasks using the console application structure of Yii 2.

Fabrizio Caldarelli

Fabrizio Caldarelli is an Italian programmer who started his professional career in his youth by programming with desktop-oriented languages, the first being Visual Basic. From the year 2000 onward, he spent 5 years developing software to manage radio broadcasts. During that period, he studied C#.NET to make porting of all software versus this new platform. During the same period, he learned web programming, HTML, and ASP, and in 2003, he began to develop software using PHP as the default programming language for web pages. During those years, he collaborated as a teacher for PHP programming courses with http://www.html.it/, an important online reference for developers in Italy. In 2008, he added new skills to his experience by starting to develop mobile projects for Nokia devices with Symbian C++, and a few years later, he started working on projects for iOS, Android, and naturally Windows phone. After many PHP-based web projects, in late 2012, he moved on to the Yii framework as his primary framework for developing web applications. Since then, he has built many important projects based on Yii 1 and later on Yii 2, day by day discovering the powerful improvement that Yii provides to getting work done. Now he lives in Sacrofano, a small town near Rome, with his wife, Serena.