About Yii 1.1.x and future plan

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
21

Our rough idea is that we will create a separate Google project to host these official extensions. They will also be maintained and released separately from Yii core framework. We will recruit new members specially to work on these extensions. We call them official extensions because the core team members will participate and guide the development and will control the overall quality of these extensions.

In general, the official extensions may include any commonly used Web code. They are not as common as the core framework code, but should be common enough to be useful for most developers.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to discuss it here. Thanks!

22

I’d like to see a powerful application managament software (the successor of yiic) with built-in ability to download components directly from Google Code into the adequate application subfolder.

If Yii will come in a pack with these extensions together, it’d be far more quicker to copy component files into new app installations without a connection to Google Code. (I firmly believe this is complicated because of the constantly evolving components. Maybe it’d be better to talk about yiic’s SVN features.)

Having mentioned a few possible extensions above, I’d also like to notice that non-essential components should be separated as standalone extensions as well. For instance, I very rarely use theme managament so do other developers in my opinion.

Important and heavier extensions might deserve a separate project for the sake of simplicity. A summary (wiki?) page is recommended at http://www.yiiframework.com/extensions/, which section already contains many components to be exported.

I’d be happy with a central webadmin interface, where I’d be able to see the overall status about all of my apps available on my host I created. This table could contain information about logs, configs, roadmap plans, tasks, etc.

How do these ideas sound?

23

Now that PHP 5.3 has been released, is there a plan (maybe for 1.2) for including features such as namespaces in Yii?

24

Please see the answers here: http://www.yiiframew…pic,3029.0.html

25

Is it possible to develop using Yii 1.0 but in a 1.1-ready way, or are there incompatible changes?

If it is possible, what are your recommendations in order to have a 1.1-ready app?

26

This framework is incredibly good… too good! Pretty soon any monkey can pick it up and create web applications, putting guys like me out of work :lol:

Seriously brilliant!

27

to me, the most important thing is a command in yiic which performs the migration from the previous version (like 1.0.9). I keep my projects up-to-dated but if the 1.1 architecture comes with too much incompatibilities, it could take too much time to migrate from 1.0 to 1.1…

just it, all the rest are natural improvements

:>)

28

Hi, after exploring Yii a bit, I can only congratulate - this is really fine work. Thank you very much for putting this into public and inviting people to work on it!

My 2 cents:

I also vote for a migrations tool! A help for migrations, deployment and versioning is really essential - if you once used it, you will not ever touch a tool that does not have any migrations power - it is basically like going back from a 100 PS motocycle to your childhoods tricycle.

It would be great to see http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/yii-dbmigrations/ supported and integrated into core. If not this, maybe some phing based or any other deployment and migration infrastructure should be actively supported by yii.

Also I would like to see some kind of better infrastructure with extensions - ATM there is no versioning and no way to deploy / install a current set of extensions, also there should be some dependency and "x breaks y" warnings and so on - maybe a pear channel or any existing package deployment infrastructure would be cool. I see big danger of a totally overloaded and chaotic extension website which will bring chaos into the framework, if not security problems. There should be some official review process for extensions and the status of this process should be added as a property to this extension - there should be an explicit extension release policy, e.g. something like the Debian project infrstructure. Also I would like to checkout and update all extensions from a revision control system.

Finally I would like to suggest to use Mercurial as a versioning backend, as the decentralized approach is miles ahead of the old centralized svn paradigm. Really the only way to go for open source projects :) Please read the mercurial docs and you will never go back to svn…

THANKS!

29

i would like to request a feature :

  • add a console command (like yii make zip) to create deployment package. the deployment file should consists of 2 files, installer.php and web-apps.tar.gz (web-apps.tar.gz contains framework, libraries and its web apps)

at the moment, when we deploy an apps, we need to edit / modify yii.php and install framework separately … which not convenience for general users.

you can adopt the directory structure that codeigniter have at the moment, so when yii upgraded we just install new codeigniter and install web-apps inside … (all in one directory)

30

how about liquibase, they have versioning as well … i am using this liquibase for a year.

(www.liquibase.org)

31

Hello,

october is not that far anymore… I was wondering if there are more information about changes that will be introduced in 1.1 that are not listed in the main features you find on the roadmap…

I mean… small but handy things that makes the daily usage of the framework just better… I’ve read of them in some post in the forums like “this feature is / will be available on 1.1” but now can’t remember them…

can qiang or some early adopter 1.1 try to summarize them here or in another topic? thanks :)

also on another topic a user asked why there is just one commited developer; I’m not sure if this is 100% true but for sure the dev. team is a small one; are there any plan to have others developers to join? A team too big could lead to confusion but a team too small could lead to its death (like having no more active developers). (this subject fits well with the official extension team idea and the future plan for yii dev.)

thanks

bye,

Giovanni.

32

Many previous 1.1 enhancements were already implemented in 1.0.x releases. For 1.1 alone, we have completed the following:

  • Testing framework

  • Form builder

  • Refactored scenario-based validation and massive assignments

  • Refactored AR relational query

The remaining two big things are: a Web-based RAD and admin console, and the zii library. Both of them involve tremendous effort, and we expect they need to be continuously developed throughout the 1.1.x releases.

For the 1.1 alpha release, we may not include the Web console. It is not because we give up the idea. It is because we have learned a lot of real experiences when using Yii in some big private projects and we need time to incorporate these ideas into this tool.

We will soon start the zii project and recruit new members for it.

33

Thanks for the information! sounds good :) and I do agree with your choices.

thanks.

bye,

Giovanni.

34

What is zii library?

35

If I’ve got it right, yii will continue to be a lightweight framework core, then we will have zii that will be official extensions.

bye,

Giovanni.

36

Yes, that is the goal. We want the core as stable as possible and the zii lib as feature-rich as possible.

37

I would like to request "not so important" but nice to have. if it is possible please add column alias in Active record.

this would be useful for people who need to migrate from another frameworks.

I did an apps with Grails (Gorm is AR in Grails). In Grails, when I type eg firstName, Gorm will generate first_name field in mysql table. But I am still able to access it as first_name or firstName

38

adwin,

You can extend CActiveRecord::getAttribute() so that it uses inflectors to provide aliases you choose.

39

Is there a plan to support frontend and backend applications? see symfony or joomla.

There is a workaround in cookbook, but I m not that satisfied with it.

40

+1 for zii containing a fairly rich base app including layout,themes,users,simple modular blog app,ajax,jquery goodness

I think this is enormously helpful for people getting up and running and is what creates a road block to other frameworks. I know there are many ways to create an app but I for one like to tinker with a working app first.

If I give zend framework as an example you need to almost understand the framework back to front before you can even start. I like that you can build a site first then start learning different ways to do x y and z.

I also think it would be great to download and install a component/module from a central depository from the web gui. I think this sort of apps based development think iphone/android is the way foreward for web app development too.