Third party HTML Integration

Hi

I have to create an entirely different front end than what YII gives and my organisation has hired another company to develop the front end i.e the Views. They will deliver pure HTML , JS, CSS

I need to integrate it with YII and code the whole back end in YII.

Can you please give some pointers on what should we convey to the front end developers and how should we go about integration of these Views in HTML with YII.

I am trying to figure out should I use theme folder to put their CSS and JS and IMAGES without running the risk of YII CSS overrriding theirs ?

The HTML we got has no forms just the DIV… WE have to insert YII style forms in between just to connect Views with models as validation are coded inside Models… Or we can still use plain HTML form instead of YII::form??

Thanks

Sounds like nothing that were impossible. Yii apps can look entirely different from what a bootstrapped app looks like. Create a new theme and go on from there. Inserting the output of CActiveForm etc. into HTML is actually pretty straightforward.

If I were you, I’d probably start by creating the layout (i.e. the part of the design that is common to all pages). And read the relevant section in the Yii guide.

thanks for the pointers, I have another question related to that -

for ex - Can we replace this line from View File with equivalent HTML and PHP ?


<?php echo CHtml::activeTextField($model,'username',  array('onfocus'=>'clearText(this)', 'onblur'=>'clearText(this)', 'class'=>'formbox')) ?>



Well, yes you could. But do you really want that?

You could, but especially in forms you will lose all the advantages of the built-in validation, error display etc. Yii offers. Is it possible for the UI people to respect these functions and conventions? It’s not like they generate something else then html elements.