Okay, I’ve played with a few frameworks now. CalPERS had its own custom PHP-based MVC framework. Then I played with Laravel and Ruby on Rails. But nothing prepared me for the simplicity that Yii gave me!
- A fresh Ruby app has different features compared to a fresh Laravel app compared to Yii. I don’t recall reading about a login core built-in on Ruby. Laravel documentation spells out, from the beginning, the option to use the Breeze Blade library to get the login core setup. Yii says nothing: it simply builds it right in! However, that shell had no real functionality that I would use, so I just commented it out.
- I don’t recall changing the color scheme for Ruby on Rails. Yii started out with the classic and basic black background for the Nav Bar, which I think is preferred since it is a very common and neutral color.
- Yii automatically added the Breadcrumbs! I don’t recall seeing that in either of the other frameworks.
- The Yii automatic draw-a-table feature (widgets) wasn’t quite easy for me to follow, but that was at first glance (I admittedly did not spend that much time digging into it). The Yii Table widget comes complete with the filter built right in and the View, Edit, and Delete buttons right there.
- There are three main kinds of files you’ll be modifying: models, controllers, and views. Where they sit within the framework folders differ. In Laravel, they are scattered. In Ruby on Rails, everything is kind of consolidated into one place: the app folder. However, both of those two frameworks build-in readiness to have lots of different kinds of modules and functionality. In Yii: everything sits at the root (it is easier to find) and you don’t feel like you’re swimming in this lightweight framework through all of the other features you’re not likely to use for a simple app.
Why on Earth would I use Yii? A job. Maybe. Yeah, that was the first job listing that I got an interview for. So I figured I would try the framework out and see how designing with it is. Would I design more applications using Yii? Only for a job. I’ve seen dozens (maybe even hundreds) of jobs for Laravel, Drupal, Django, and Spring. This was the only one I’ve seen for Yii. But I’m glad I tried.