The Yii is an open-source, light-weighted PHP based framework used to develop a whole web application much faster. It accelerates a web development application rapidly.

The Yii (pronounced as Yee or Jii) is a Chinese name which is an acronym for Yes It Is and it means simple and evolutionary. It is suitable for every sized project giving highly optimized performance.

It uses model-view-controller approach. It includes a code generator called Gii, which writes the code for you and save your time.

History

Qiang Xue founded Yii project on January 1, 2008. It overcomes the slow handling process of complex pages, difficulty to customize many controls and steep learning curve.

On December 3, 2008, after almost one year's development Yii 1.0 version was released for the public.

On October 2014, Yii 2.0.0 was released which is a complete rewrite of the earlier version by keeping the original simplicity and feasibility while adopting the latest technologies to make it better.

In our tutorial we will study about the latest Yii version that is Yii2.

Yii Licensing

Yii is released under New BSD License under which it can be freely used to develop a web application.

Yii documentation is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) which means it can be copied, redistributed or modified before its next version is released.

Yii logo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Yii Version

Yii has released Yii 1.0, Yii 1.1 and Yii 2.0 with their extensions.

  • Yii 1.0 was released on December 3, 2008. Many other extended versions of 1.0 came into existence. It supported PHP 5.1.0 or above and it is no longer used. It's maintenance stopped in December 31, 2010.
  • Yii 1.1.0 was released in January 10, 2010. Many other extended versions of 1.1.0 came into existence. It supports PHP 5.1.0 or above and is still used. It's maintenance stopped in December 31, 2016.
  • Yii 2.0.0 was released in October 12, 2014. Some extended versions of this version are also released and it also supports PHP 5.1.0 or above.

    • Yii 2 is the current and updated version of Yii. It's last release was Yii 2.0.10 in October 20, 2016

Prerequisites

Yii is a powerful console tool. Hence it is recommended to have a command line access to develop an application.

Following things are required to use Yii:

  • PHP 5.4+
  • Web server