Chapter 1, A Task-management Application, covers developing a simple task-management application from the ground up using SQLite and basic database migrations. This chapter will cover all the moving parts of Yii and prepare you for working with more complex applications.

Chapter 2, Discovering What's Nearby, covers how to integrate the Yii framework with the Google Maps API to display information about what is near a given user. You'll also learn how to create command-line tools to handle importing and processing data.

Chapter 3, Scheduled Reminders, focuses on developing a multiuser web-based scheduling and reminders application that can notify users via e-mail when a scheduled event is about to occur.

Chapter 4, Developing an Issue-tracking Application, covers how to create a multiuser issue-tracking and management system, complete with an e-mail notification system using MySQL as a database backend. This chapter will also cover handling input from e-mail submissions to trigger actions within the application.

Chapter 5, Creating a Microblogging Platform, covers how to create your own microblogging platform similar to Twitter, complete with a robust user authentication and registration system. You'll also learn how to integrate your application with third-party social networks using HybridAuth, as well as how to streamline your headless development time with Composer.

Chapter 6, Building a Content Management System, covers how to create a feature-complete content management system and blogging platform that expands using the knowledge built upon in the previous chapters. This chapter will also demonstrate how to integrate with even more third-party open source libraries.

Chapter 7, Creating a Management Module for the CMS, focuses on the development of a management module for the content management system built in the previous chapter. In this chapter, you'll learn how to migrate data from controllers to a Yii module that can be reused and managed independently of the content management system.

Chapter 8, Building an API for the CMS, covers how to create a JSON REST API module for the content management system that can be used for both client-side web applications and native development. This chapter will cover the basics of creating a secure and authenticated JSON REST API, and will demonstrate how to adapt controller actions for JSON responses rather than web view responses.

To ensure that you can run the examples provided on any operating system and to ensure the accuracy of command-line entries, this book will use VirtualBox and Vagrant to establish a common development platform. Provided with this book are instructions on how to set up this cross-platform development environment. For this book, you'll need the following:

This book is for you if you are a PHP developer with a good knowledge of PHP5 and some experience with the Yii framework and want to jump-start your knowledge of Yii and start building reusable real-world applications and tools.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We'll also need to modify our UserIdentity class to allow for socially authenticated users to sign in."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?php
// change the following paths if necessary
$config=dirname(__FILE__).'/config/main.php';
$config = require($config);
require_once('/opt/frameworks/php/yii/framework/yiic.php');

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<div class="form-group">
<?php $selected = array('options' => array(isset($_
GET['id']) ? $_GET['id'] : NULL => array('selected' => true))); ?>
<?php echo CHtml::dropDownList('id', array(), CH
tml::listData(Location::model()->findAll(),'id','name'), 
CMap::mergeArray($selected, array('empty' => 'Select a Location'))); 
?>
</div>
<button type="submit" class="pull-right btn btnprimary">Search</button>
</form>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ php protected/yiic.php migrate up

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the link titled Model Generator, and then fill in the form on the page that appears."

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

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