Thoughts about Yii

Hi, the following I’m about to say is just a personal opinion, so feel free to take or dismiss it at will, just keep it friendly.

I’ve been around since the website was green, so to “some extent” I now what I’m talking about. The framework marketing in general and in version 2 in particular, sucks. Not talking about code, not documentation, but marketing. Okay, I’m more specifically refering to website marketing, but it can be extrapolated to other marketing areas as well.

The framework is coming to It’s 2 years from release, and It’s still using 1.1 web design. It just sucks. And 1.1 design wasn’t really that good to begin with. It’s not my bussiness, you say, but It afects me, as in the more the framework is known, the bigger its community becomes, the easier it gets to sell it to customers in the form of applications, the easier it gets to hire local developers to aid on it, etcetera. See? size matters. Not saying Yii is small, but the cake is certainly larger.

Framework development itself is first and foremost, you say, and I agree. But You’re not supposed to do this things by yourself, there are companies you can delegate to. The only reasons I can imagine you haven’t done it so far, are either you not have the economical resources to or it really isn’t a big deal for you.

If it’s the first, that can be figured out. If it’s the latter, I’ll sit back and wait 'till Quiang Xue comes back from his sabatical year with a brand new design.

So you are here for so long… but at the same time you have so little posts… and that is the main problem with the community… everybody is waiting for someone else… why not help to build the new site… it’s on github… anybody can jump in and help a bit…

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I’m very grateful for you have done because I’m beneficiary of you’re work. I learnt OOP from other languages, but I now little about PHP, back-end, or Yii for that matter as I’m more a front-end developer. So, in the not that common ocassions I need back-end, Yii is my choice.

That’s why you don’t see me here so often, and likely you won’t. My interactions are mostly limited to when I’m stuck at something, not that I’m a valuable asset for the community anyway.

In my opinion the community it not resposible for leading the marketing of the framework, but Yii software LLC. But in the end it doesn’t matter much who is, but WHO DOES the marketing. Which leads to my next point.

I’m afraid It doesn’t work that way, not in order to get optimal results at least. For optimal results, you don’t crowdsource it, you hire. You don’t get what’s available, but what’s necessary. Profesional core development team, professionals marketing it. If you can’t afford, the community can help I trust.

Yes, marketing isn’t our best area. New website is in the works as Maurizio pointed above and we’ll release it one day.

We aren’t commercial (Yii software LLC. is to protect “Yii framework” name, nothing more) so we don’t really have resources to hire third party companies to delegate some workload. We’re doing Yii-related things in our free time which is what’s left after our fulltime jobs.

I didn’t knew that. I always believed you were a commercial entity for some source profit. I didn’t want to be rude at all. Anyway, if anytime you decide to raise funds, I’m all in.

OK. Thanks for honest and direct thoughts.