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Large applications are often divided into front-end and back-end (or even more ends) depending on the target user groups. The front-end should be used by common users, while the back-end mainly the administrators or staff members. The two ends usually have dramatically different appearance, even though they may share a lot of code underneath. In this tutorial, we describe a way of organizing directories of the code for both ends.

Info: This tutorial references the idea presented in Jonah's excellent blog article.

Because Yii intends to be integrated nicely with third-party libraries, it does not define any global functions. Everything in Yii needs to be addressed with full class name or object scopes. For example, to access the current user, we need to use Yii::app()->user; to access application parameters, we need Yii::app()->params['name']; and so on. While editors like textmate can help alleviate the problem of these lengthy typings, it is worthwhile to define global shortcut functions to some commonly used method calls. They will make the application code look cleaner.

Since Yii 1.0.5 you can use named scopes with ActiveRecords. They are a great help in simplifying your query calls.

This is the first real problem that I encountered using Yii, trying to make a Model input repeatable in the form, validate and save them.

In this tutorial, we describe how to implement multiple layouts for action views in an application. As an example, we assume that the pages in our application will use three different layouts:

The Yii documentation states:

As seen in this post, Yii doesn't enforce how language is set and maintained within the session.

Note: CAutoComplete is deprecated since Yii 1.1.3. Consider using CJuiAutoComplete.

Often you'll need a form with two dropdowns, and one dropdown's values will be dependent on the value of the other dropdown. Using Yii's built-in AJAX functionality you can create such a dropdown.