Yii has been carefully designed to allow nearly every piece of its code to be extended and customized to meet almost any need or requirement. In fact, it is difficult not to take advantage of Yii's ease of extensibility as a primary activity when developing a Yii-driven application, which is extending the core framework classes. If you want to turn your extended code into useful tools for other developers to use, Yii provides easy-to-follow steps and guidelines to help you create such third-party extensions. This allows you to contribute to Yii's ever-growing list of features and actively participate in extending Yii itself.
What is also remarkable about Yii is its ease of use, superior performance, and its depth of extensibility which does not come at the cost of sacrificing features. Yii is packed with features to help you meet those high demands placed on today's web applications. AJAX-enabled widgets, web service integration, enforcement of an MVC architecture, DAO and relational Active Record database layer, sophisticated caching, hierarchical role-based access control, theming, internationalization (I18N), and localization (L10N), are just the tip of the Yii iceberg. As of version 1.1, the core framework is now packaged with an official extension library called Zii. These extensions are developed and maintained by the core framework team members who continue to extend Yii's core feature set. With a deep community of users who are also contributing by writing Yii extensions, the overall feature set available to a Yii powered application is growing daily. For a complete list of all available user contributed extensions, see http://www.yiiframework.com/extensions/.