Wiki articles in category How-tos

To fix issues with display of special language characters once and for all there's a solution: use Unicode UTF-8 everywhere. If everything is set up to use Unicode, you can use mostly every language in your application.

Original source code and idea are from: PHP, PDO & Nested Transactions.

This is a reference to be used for Model rule validation and is compiled from the Yii documentation and code. The purpose is to have all the information gathered in one place instead of scattered. This reference is not an intro. See The Definitive Guide to Yii, Declaring Validation Rules for a tutorial.

In this cookbook I will attempt to explain how to use the lightweight version of Role-Based Access Control using a php file. This version does not use database but a php file and is controlled by CPhpAuthManager class.

From: http://lacot.org/ and me.

The keywords will be stored in a text field in a comma delimited format. The keywords will be created by the site administrator.

There are two ways to run a cron job:

Yii makes it really easy for all to use their already made objects that automate everything we do. It provides also great power of flexibility and styling but hey, we programmers tend to complicate our lives and push a little more the power of our tools.

It is good when someone writes extensions for us but trust, sometimes we forget about other approaches that, if we know the library, we shouldn't forget.

Trying to learn and help some other programmers to find their solutions on the Yii Forum (I think is a superb way to learn the framework), I was facing one challenge with an external library that a fellow programmer wanted to use -quite good indeed: PHPExcel. And what is PHPExcel?

The easiest way to customize look and behaviour of them is to use series of CButtonColumn properties, like: updateButtonImageUrl (path to image for update button), updateButtonLabel (label for the update button; not HTML-encoded), updateButtonOptions (HTML options for this button, used in the way as many htmlOptions property for many widgets) and updateButtonUrl (a PHP expresion th...

In this short how-to I will show how to customize setFlash() to display messages (flashes) styled to be success confirmation, error report or notice information. And how to achieve displaying errors in other way.

This very short how-to presents steps required to change controller name. It is oriented for less experienced users, which are starting their journey with Yii, to avoid common newbie pitfalls.

One can control the detail of a web application in the webroot/index.php file by manipulating the values of YII_DEBUG and YII_TRACE_LEVEL, but these don't appear to be used by console applications. This is because although the base CApplication class defines a displayError() method that does consider these variable, CConsoleApplication overrides it with a function that doesn't honor th...

Yii comes with a set of powerful classes for logging. If you have read the documentation about logging messages, you have noticed that we can actually decide which messages we wish to log. And this is exactly what we are going to do, using [CWebLogRoute](http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CWebLog...

Yii's by-default directory organization works well enough, but there are several steps one can take that improve the security and serviceability of the system, especially in the context of multiple Yii projects on the same machine (including multiple versions of the same project).

In this article I'll try to explain how to use standard quick search fields in CGridView with customized columns.
For example:
We have a record in a database with field switch having 0 or 1 values. After that we want a user to see on or off instead 1 or 0.
So we do the usual thing:

<?php $this->widget('zii.widgets.grid.CGridView', array(
//.....
array(
    'name'=>'...

Please, note. This article is entirely based on a work done by me colleague developer, who hasn't got account on this webpage and also hasn't got time for writing this article. I'm writing it for him. I will try to forward him any comments that may appear, but can't assure if/when he'll be able to answer. I'm far, far less experienced in Oracle therefore I won't probably be able to help myself.

The customary configuration of a Yii application includes just a single database section in the protected/config/main.php file, but it's easy to extend this to support more than one, tying each Model to one of the databases.

Occasionally one wishes to set systemwide parameters for an application, such as a contact address for email, an application name, or setting an option that guides major behavior. Yii provides for setting of static parameters in the configuration file, and this article talks about how to do it conveniently.