I really want to like Yii and I’m digging in, working on my first major Yii based site.
I’m going to put down today’s problems - in the hope that someone can help improve/correct the pitfalls I’ve been running into:
Yii Web Site searching engine problems:
search for ‘nestedset’ in extensions does not return results
link from extension jsTree to forum discussions is broken/incorrect (returns you to the main forums page)
link from extension nestedset to forum discussions is also broken
Indexing seems spotty on 3 letter words. Yesterday a site wide search for ‘zii’ did not return anything (it is working today)
search definitive guide for ‘widget’ gives no results (search entire site does give results)
Edit forum entry is broken:
When I went to edit this forum entry the first time I lost all my line feeds from the previous entry (running on FF Mac 3.5.7). Did not do this on the second edit. On the third edit the html was not correctly coded and the br tags appear (I’m doing this is a text doc and pasting it now).
Many of the forum links are broken because the editor seems to eat them.
Suggestions:
I’ve noted that many of the extensions I’m looking to use have questions/fixes posted in the forums and yet have had no response for up to 6 months! Perhaps it would be a good idea to ask people who post extensions to take some kind of responsiblity to be maintainers of that extension. If they don’t have the time then another maintainer could be searched for? This works over at Drupal and it is nice to know if a extension is being actively maintained before a newbie wants to invest time in it.
In the definitive guide when sample code snippets are written out, rarely is it mentioned where the code should actually go (into which file). I have found this really slows down my learning process. Simply by going into the guide and adding paths to all the sample code snippets should go would immensely improve the learning curve for newbies.
Being new to Yii myself, I’m with you on all of these issues. Especially the search problems; it is rather difficult to learn something new like this when you can’t find the information you need.
I am quite pleased with Yii itself so far, though the site could use some work.
Agreed, kinda makes you wonder how we’re supposed to feel confident that Yii can be used for real websites, when Yii’s own website has such glitches :-\
There is a lack of expert support available for newbie developers. It often takes days for queries to be answered in the forum. I think in the API reference there ought to be example code/solutions for the most useful methods.
Agreed, and I’ve also found docs recently that are incorrect, so that’s another stumbling block.
Really, if there were at least 1 or 2 really knowledgeable individuals in IRC (or posting more often in the forums), it’d make it easier to bypass some of these stumbling blocks.
Ah well though, such is the nature of a young open-source project :-\
I agree to these things, though the extensions are not really under the control of the Yii team (which is good as it lowers the barriers).
I’d like to see much more examples to the various core classes. Maybe making the API comment feature more prominent would be a good start. Also having the ability to place the comment right next to the method I’d like to comment on would be superb.
Enhancing the guide to include even more of the advanced topics would be something I’d love to see. I was positively surprised to find information on combining Scripts for website performance. Yet I dearly miss information on how to actually work with a MANY_MANY relationship.
Why not use the “user reputation” value as a guide for the user status, for example if you have 20+ reputation the status below your display name can say “Yii Expert” or something similar. This might encourage more people to try and help others in the forum
@GSTAR "user reputation" does not necessarily mean that someone knows Yii, for example in this thread ptoly got a reputation for making a good suggestion that is not about knowlege of Yii so it should not be used for displaying "yii expert" IMO…
but I agree that this can be used so more people are engaged to try help others… for example by displaying the reputation number on every user post (eg. near the number of posts the user made)
