Yii User documentation

Yii is one of the best PHP frameworks nowadays, with lot of cool features, and as I see its development every day is getting better. Nothing is perfect so also Yii has some weak points and probably the weakest point is its documentation. Source code documentation is quite precise and well structured, but with the user documentation you can not do much more than the basic blog app. Therefore most of the programming efforts require intensive forum searching and or finding how the things work my way. This is very slow and time consuming task so I would really appreciate if on of the priorities for future development would be improving it.

To suggest some key parts:

  1. Improve the structure of user documentation. Especially cookbook contains a lot of useful information that could be part of the official documentation, but has almost no structure.

  2. Improve the coverage of documentation over all framework, e.g. “conventions” part of docs is only very simple compare to for example Akelos framework (http://akelos.org/Akelos_Framework_Developer_Coding_Style_Guide.pdf)

  3. Prado framework has a very helpful thing and it are the Control demos (http://www.pradosoft.com/demos/quickstart/?page=Controls.Standard). This is what saved me a lot of time while learning Prado. If the framework will be developed directly with it's demos, it can help not only as practical examples, but also in its testing process.

What do you think, is it possible and worthy to focus on this?

Thank you for your suggestions.

  1. Yes, we plan to introduce categorization and tagging to organize cookbook better. Because cookbook can be contributed by anyone, this would be our major future documentation approach.

2). We may improve the guide documentation in future. Since it is meant for definition purpose, we are not going to put in too much details. Instead, we will rely on cookbook to explain points in details.

3). Yes, we will add such stuff in Yii as we release 1.1.

Thank you, I am looking forward to version 1.1 :wink: