Sure! Must admit, Yii wasn’t used in the contest by itself.
What I used was the design and architecture of Yii. In the
finals we had only 3 hours to develop a templating engine.
After getting the task it was evident for me that there could
never be anything better than Yii’s templating system. While
other programmers started coding from the very start, I decided
to spend time describing things I’m about to implement.
In the script I had to reimplement everything from scratch
and I’ve inclded the following: CComponent, CController,
CException, CView, CWidget and CRenderer. In this design I
had no Application, Sessions and so on… This would be
definitely outside the time boundaries.
Also, I have implement a theming support, widgets, template
inheritance, template compilation (something like CPradoViewRenderer)
and caching.
I completed the design document in 1.5 hours and spent 1.5 more
hours for coding. I’ve implemented everything except the renderer.
The code did start with an exception and I had to give up with
what I had.
Happily, judges were impressed by the framework design and gave me
the 1st place (as well as in semifinals). Thank you, Mr. Qiang for
a great school. I greatly respect your experience! 
For those who are curiuos about my contest work, I’m attaching an archive
with my contest work.
These are:
-
Eliminatory: create a website registration form (completed in 8 hours from home).
-
Semifinals: create a page management system (completed in 3 hours, psd & html only).
-
Finals: implement a templating engine (completed in 3 hours, architecture is from Yii).
All of them are runnable for now. Readme files inside are in russian, but google
translates russian to english pretty well.
Let me know what you guys think. Gone fighting with HRs
