@mfrancis107: you have to define a rule that allows parameter to be part of the url path:
'site/user/id/<id:\d+>' => 'site/user',
@Tropi: I do not see the benefit about giving a name/alias to a route.
When you want to redirect somewhere you say ‘controller/action’ and url will be build from urlmanager rules. This concept is not needed as we already have a fixed schema for routing in yii. Laravel does not have this as far as I see from the docs there.
So what if I want to do it like in the forums? Profile URIs here look like: site/user/54083-tropi. If I want to include the username in links (for example for SEO), I have to edit ALL the createUrl() statements instead of just changig one named "profile route".