So, after a newbie has learnt enough from this lot to understand MVC, get Yii installed, a server working, database set up to Yii conventions, and CRUD working…
… what next? It’s still daunting to face a large class collection and thousands of methods and ways of doing things without being shown the way.
I’m wondering if anyone gets this far and then gives up and just adds to the basic app the old fashioned way in their own PHP - ignoring the TONS of extra framework ways of doing things - because knuckling down and studying the Yii way to do it all seems to be more work?!
Are there any good "Next Steps" tutorials, giving a good complete overview (without getting bogged down in details) of all the basic ways of doing all the things we need to know?
First of all, be sure that you’ve understand base concepts of YII - MVC (very important), how MVC is represented in YII, access control in YII, YII views, layouts, widgets, etc.
Then I suggest just to start coding some project and try to use your knowledge - practice is all that is needed to dive into something new. And don’t hesitate to google your questions while coding - more luckily, your questions are already answered!
http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/ (this could be quite boring to read this for the first time, but later you will return there uncountable times) - at least read "Fundumentals" section.
?
In addition, you could buy YII book(s) from 3 books available here - http://www.yiiframework.com/tutorials/ - books are the best way to learn, from my point of view.
P.S. Links in your post are broken, correct them please.
There seems to be a lack of Next Steps tutorials out there. The 8 page Larry U. tutorial is described as ‘difficulty level 1’ and is mostly easy to follow, but everything from then onwards (that I’ve seen so far) has taken the approach of working through example apps, which isn’t my favourite way to learn. I can cope with incremental learning, but get discouraged by “take a deep breath, prepare to devote hours of instense study to this long winded thing and with any luck it may, perhaps, pay off - if you can face keeping going with it”.
I respond well to the kind of books that get 5 star reviews on Amazon because they’ve been worked on by a team of authors and reviewers, tested and refined before publishing, to make sure that they provide all the information required by the target audience without leaving them confused and helpless. I’m not keen to run into brick walls where an amateur publisher thinks he can teach but doesn’t respond well to being politely thanked and having it pointed out that part of his tutorial is confusing, but could be rescued by explaining something in 40 words instead of 20… but he then deletes my comment from his blog
Yeah, like I’m keen to give him any of my hard-earned
Am I the only one who favours well explained overviews, with clear pointers to where to go to dig deeper? A well laid out list of the 60% of what you’ll need to know (the other 40% will follow automatically once you get going and become familiar with where to look things up)…?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to sound like an entitled whinger who expects the world on a plate from a free project… I’m simply asking if anyone knows of anything out there anywhere that may already suit my needs?
And if not, it’s also a kind of ‘call to arms’ - because if The Community works together to provide the kind of docs that a lazy git like me can follow easily, then surely hordes of others will follow and Yii will gather massive momentum. If you want that, of course
You won’t get that by throwing a phone book onto someone’s desk with a thud and saying “here you are, learn this”. But what a tragic shame it would be if a really good framework could be explained in a 100 page guide but no-one ever takes the opportunity.
