Archives For Web Development

Much Ado About Yii

October 21, 2014

Without much formality (aside from the Shakespeare), I’d like to share four bits of Yii-related news:

The Release Candidate of Yii 2
Progress on “The Yii Book”
Looking ahead to “The Yii 2 Book” (aka, the second edition)
An online Yii 2 presentation I’m doing this Thursday, October 23, 2014 for Nomad PHP

Continue Reading...

The first thing you’ll need to know to use JavaScript and jQuery in Yii is how to add JavaScript to a Web page. As with any standard Web page, there are two primary options:

Link to an external file that contains the JavaScript code
Place the JavaScript code directly in the page using SCRIPT tags
Just as I assume you’re already comfortable with JavaScript, I’ll also assume you know the arguments for and against both approaches. (Technically, there’s a third option: place the JavaScript inline within an HTML tag. This is not a recommended approach in modern Web sites, however, and I won’t demonstrate it here.)

Continue Reading...

So………you may have noticed that it’s been a while since my last newsletter. It’s been a loooong while. And, technically, the last newsletter was just a “hey, I’m going to start doing newsletters again”, so the last real newsletter was even longer ago. Hmmm…as you may know, I’m pretty crazy busy these days, and some things just aren’t getting done (despite the fact that I’m working 7 days a week, ugh). But let’s not dwell on the past, but rather revel in this, a new newsletter!

In this edition, I wanted to share some of the resources that I like to use for learning about new things. Safe to say that my (this) newsletter is rather personal and different (and more inconsistent!) than most. I gather people do find my newsletter to be useful, which is good, considering the effort I actually put into it. But if you’d like to broaden your horizons, to get information from other sources, these other newsletters are worth considering, too. Truth be told, then tend to stack up in my email until I have time to review them like once a month. And then I have to bookmark the articles I’m interested in for later reading, but still…worth considering and subscribing to. (They’re all free, by the way.)

Looking ahead, I have tentative newsletters scheduled on: the business of freelancing; attending and speaking at conferences; and on writing and publishing. I’m going to try to do better about getting these newsletters out more regularly, like every month-ish. As I’ll address later in this newsletter, the first version of “The Yii Book” is winding down, and I’ll be completing it and the version for Yii 2 this summer, so I’m hoping that my life becomes a lot more maintainable in the near future.

Returning to this newsletter, if you have any resources that you value that I didn’t mention, please let me know and I’ll include it in a follow-up. As always, questions, comments, and all feedback are much appreciated. And thanks for your interest in what I have to say and do!

Continue Reading...

On Sunday night I posted Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of “The Yii Book”. The chapter is 39 pages long as a PDF, with the following contents:

Installation
Accessing Library Classes
Working with Composer
Using Symfony
Using Swift Mailer
Using Elasticsearch
Most of the chapter covers Elasticsearch, creating the shell of a search engine. This rules out the need for Chapter 24, “Implementing a Search Engine,” in my opinion. So, by my count, after this, there are 4 chapters left.

Continue Reading...

As you may already know, the beta of Yii 2 was announced yesterday. Besides being another release, which is a good thing, officially reaching beta status means that no new major features will be added before Yii 2 is released. In other words, what Yii 2 looks like in beta will be pretty close to what Yii 2 is. Yay!

Rather than discussing all, or the most important, changes in Yii 2, I’d recommend you read the announcement page linked above. As for how I imagine this will play out looking forward…

Continue Reading...