Hi!
As a quick introduction, I’m part of a team of programmers who support a large organization with internal applications to cover departmental needs, ranging from simple data management to integrating databases and interfaces to large 3rd party apps. A lot of this was originally done in a huge monolithic Yii 1.x app in the mid 2010s, then over the last six years we’ve split up and migrated functional pieces into smaller Yii2 apps using jQuery and Bootstrap 4/5 and Docker for deployment, all while adding dozens of new apps as well. At this point, we have probably well over 150 and maybe close to 200 of these apps. Because of upcoming changes to underlying systems, and with the desire to modernize and normalize the look and feel of all these apps, we’re considering changing our base application again sometime by the end of this year.
We’re considering a lot of options here. Yii3, Laravel, Svelte, Angular, Vue, React, Flowbite, shadcn, everything is on the table including trying to keep our server side for all the apps mostly unchanged Yii2 while tearing out the front end and replacing it with something more modern.
We were particularly disappointed in the state of Yii3 – despite a lot of the promise of it from descriptions we read years ago, it seems to have none of the advantages which drew us to Yii in the first place - the learning curve is as bad, if not worse, as all the other frameworks, it completely abandons the MVC design pattern which served Yii2 so well, it doesn’t have a working Gii (and still no clue when that will actually be usable), and it offers no useful migration path we can see other than “just rewrite your code to the Yii3 design”. (The migration instructions in the guide aren’t much help for this, either – they’re pretty much incomprehensible unless you’re already deeply entrenched in how Yii3 is designed and works…) The general consensus so far on that point is that if we’re going to do that much work to migrate to Yii3, why not migrate to Laravel instead as it’s got a larger, more stable, better documented ecosystem? There’s not much in the Yii3 docs which explain what advantages (if any) it has over other modern PHP frameworks.
The other thing we were really concerned about was the support for Yii2 if we decided to somehow tear out our jQuery/Bootstrap design and retrofit a different front end code/design scheme onto it. The “Release Cycle” page talks about Yii2 reaching EOL around the end of 2027. If that’s the case, we really don’t want to be using it for the new round of application building and have to do this all over again a year later.
Which brings us to Yii 2.2. (Or is it 22?) Which is mentioned in the release cycle page and a few forum and issues posts… but with almost NO detail about it at all, especially concerning as the release cycle page lists an estimate of it being released by the end of 2026, which is fast approaching. What I could find out so far is it’s supposed to offer a migration path from Yii 2, and be at least partially built on Yii 3 packages… but that’s about it.
Can we get at least some kind of Design Goals page for this? Something maybe explaining how much effort it’s going to take to convert a Yii 2 app to 2.2? A progress page like we had for Yii3? You don’t even have a Yii 2.2 category in this forum. Anything we can use to inform our decision on which way to go from here would be helpful.