I have come from a Drupal development environment and am now developing an application with Yii. There is a great virtual Ubuntu development environment for Drupal called Quickstart, and so I was curious if it would work for Yii as well. It turns out that it does work very well. I documented this on the Drupal site here:
Once installed, you can step through your Yii project, set breakpoints, etc. It comes in very handy. Thought the Yii community would like to know.
Perhaps at some point there could be a Quickstart-Yii version so it would not even be necessary to delete the Drupal files. But there would need to be an analog in Yii for the Drupal command line tool of drush in order to create the references for the websites, etc. Or perhaps it could be done with bash. But it is pretty simple as is also.
Have fun!