Book Image

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The Yii framework is a rapidly growing PHP5 MVC framework often referred to as Rails for PHP. It has already become a solid base for many exciting web applications such as Stay.com and can be a good base for your developments, too. This book will help you to learn Yii quickly and in more depth for use in for your developments."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will show you how to use Yii efficiently. You will learn about taking shortcuts using core features, creating your own reusable code base, using test driven development, and many more topics that will give you a lot of experience in a moderate amount of time.The second edition fixes all errata found in the first edition and also features new recipes on the client side, HTTP caching, and using Composer with Yii.The chapters of the book are generally independent and since this book's goal is to enhance a practical approach to Yii development, you can start reading from the chapter you need most, be it Ajax and jQuery, Database, Active Record, and Model Tricks, or Extending Yii."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general, showing shortcuts and dangerous things you shouldn't do.With all the recipes grouped in 13 chapters, you will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way. The most interesting topics are; Yii application deployment, a guide to writing your own extensions, advanced error handling, debugging and logging, application security, performance tuning, and much more."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general. You will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Yii Application Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Managing assets


An ability to manage assets is one of the greatest parts of Yii. It is especially useful in the following cases:

  • When you want to implement an extension that stores its JavaScript, CSS, and images in its own folder that is not accessible from a browser

  • When you need to pre-process your assets: combine JavaScript, compress it, and so on

  • When you use assets multiple times per page and want to avoid duplicates

While the first two cases could be considered as bonuses, the third one solves many widget reusing problems.

Let's create a simple widget using sample API, which will publish and use its own CSS, JavaScript, and an image.

Getting ready

  1. Create a fresh Yii application using yiic webapp as described in the official guide.

  2. Check that the assets directory under application's webroot (where index.php is) has write permissions; assets will be written there.

  3. Generate and download a preloader image from http://ajaxload.info/.

How to do it...

Let's do some planning first. In Yii, you can place...