Development Workflow

Having described the fundamental concepts of Yii, we show the common workflow for developing a web application using Yii. The workflow assumes that we have done the requirement analysis as well as the necessary design analysis for the application.

1. Create the skeleton directory structure. The yiic tool described in Creating First Yii Application can be used to speed up this step.

2. Configure the application. This is done by modifying the application configuration file. This step may also require writing some application components (e.g. the user component).

3. Create a model class for each type of data to be managed. The Gii tool described in Creating First Yii Application and in Automatic Code Generation can be used to automatically generate the active record class for each interested database table.

4. Create a controller class for each type of user requests. How to classify user requests depends on the actual requirement. In general, if a model class needs to be accessed by users, it should have a corresponding controller class. The Gii tool can automate this step, too.

5. Implement actions and their corresponding views. This is where the real work needs to be done.

6. Configure necessary action filters in controller classes.

7. Create themes if the theming feature is required.

8. Create translated messages if internationalization is required.

9. Spot data and views that can be cached and apply appropriate caching techniques.

10. Final tune up and deployment.

For each of the above steps, test cases may need to be created and performed.