I am hoping for a little advice or pointers to appropriate resources.
A little while ago, our Drupal website was redeveloped in YII as per the recommendation of the software house that we were using to maintain our Drupal website.
Unfortunately, the YII developer has disappeared without leaving us any documentation regarding basic maintenance of the website. I am very familiar with Drupal with a working knowledge of PHP but I am absolutely lost when it comes to maintaining the YII site.
I have found several resources geared towards developers but nothing to help a user of a YII site. I need to perform basic functions such as adding new pages, updating links, amending meta tags, updating page copy, changing images, etc., etc. What was a breeze in Drupal looks almost impossible (to me) in YII.
Drupal is a web application called CMS (contents management system) that is focused on the management (creating, deleting, updating, restructuring, … etc) of a web site contents, and is meant to be used by the end users. Generally you don’t need to have knowledge of PHP to use it.
But Yii is just a generic PHP framework that can be used to construct any kind of web application and is meant to be used by the PHP developers. You can use Yii to construct a web application like Drupal, WordPress, Movable Type, … etc.
How to manage your site? It depends on how it is constructed. No one can give you a user’s guide of it, except for the unfaithful developer who ran away from you.
Reading the guide of Yii will surely help you understand how to manage your site in the long run, but it will be a very long way to go. I don’t recommend you to do so at the moment.
Can you show us the following of your site? It may help us understand what we can do to help you.
Directory structure of you site.
The content of composer.json under the root directory.
Apologies for my delay replying to your response, which is much appreciated.
Thank you for your comments, which are very informative. Is it the case that we will require programming expertise for any alterations to the site? We were initially sold YII on the basis that the site would be easy for us to maintain. O, dear.
I will post the requested info as soon as I can access it. I know that there is no sitemap.xml so that will need to be generated.
At least, I can stop searching for something that doesn’t exist so thank you for that too.
I don’t know what happened between you and the developer, but the best thing you could do would be re-establishing a good relation. I think it’s worth trying.
It’s only a guess, but the developer could have used some third-party yii-based CMS to construct your site. In that case it will help you a lot to read its manual. That’s why I want to see the directory structure and the content of composer.json.
