Features of Yii

Whether you are one developer building a fairly simple Web site, or a team of distributed developers building an extremely complex Web application, using Yii is like augmenting your development team with additional experienced, professional, and efficient resources. All for free!

You can stay focused on the tasks specific to your business requirements, and let Yii provide an implementation strategy for all of the following:

• Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern Yii adopts the proven MVC architecture, which allows for clean separation of concerns (SoC).
• Database Access Objects (DAO), Query Builder, Active Record, DB Migration Yii allows developers to model database data in terms of objects and avoid the tedium and complexity of writing repetitive SQL statements.
• Form input and validation Yii makes collecting form input extremely easy and safe. It comes with a set of validators as well as numerous helper methods and widgets to simplify the task for form input and validation.
• AJAX-enabled widgets Integrated with jQuery, Yii comes with a set of AJAX-enabled widgets, such as auto-complete input field, treeview, data grid, which enables writing highly efficient and versatile user interface extremely simple.
• Authentication and authorization Yii has built-in authentication support. It also supports authorization via hierarchical role-based access control (RBAC).
• Skinning and theming Yii implements a skinning and theming mechanism that allows you to quickly switch the outlook of a Yii-power website.
• Web services Yii supports automatic generation of complex WSDL service specifications and management of Web service request handling.
• Internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N) Yii supports message translation, date and time formatting, number formatting, and interface localization.
• Layered caching scheme Yii supports data caching, page caching, fragment caching and dynamic content. The storage medium of caching can be changed easily without touching the application code.
• Error handling and logging Errors are handled and presented more nicely, and log messages can be categorized, filtered and routed to different destinations.
• Security Yii is equipped with many security measures to help prevent your Web applications from attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and cookie tampering.
• Unit and functionality testing Yii provides support for writing and running unit tests as well as functionality tests, based on PHPUnit and Selenium.
• Automatic code generation Yii provides a set of intuitive and highly extensible code generation tools that can help you quickly generate the code you need for features such as form input, CRUD.
• Friendly with third-party code Yii is carefully designed to work well with third-party code. For example, you can use code from PEAR or Zend Framework in your Yii application.
• Detailed documentation Every single method or property is clearly documented. A book and comprehensive tutorials are also available for you to systematically learn Yii.
• Extension library Yii provides an extension library consisting of user-contributed components. This makes the above feature list never ending.

You might initially try Yii for its speed, security, feature richness, and superb engineering. But you'll stick with it because it is just so intuitive, flexible and fun. Don't take our word for it. Dive in deeper and see for yourself: Take the tour. And when you're ready to get your hands a little dirty, download the framework and follow the tutorials.