First I would like to say "thank you" for such a nice framework. I've been playing around for a while with the yii, and I've got pretty common question that I didn't find the response for.
I have the application, that has static pages except of functional. I mean the pages that have only content area changed through the administrative area. Each of these pages has an unique URI identifier. I.e. "terms-conditions", "about-us", etc.
How could I serve them from my application? There isn't any pre-defined list of these pages and there URI may be changed in future via the administrative area.
This is what a typical CMS should do. Using Yii, you could do the following to implement what you want:
Store your content in a database table. Each content should be uniquely identified by something (an integer ID, the title, etc.)
Create a ContentController and a view action inside it. The view action is responsible to parse the URL and fetch the corresponding content from the database table (you can use ActiveRecord to achieve it easily).
Create an action view which renders the fetched content.
Now your URL may look like: /index.php?r=content/view&title=terms-conditions
To make it pretty, such as /content/terms-conditions, you can use Apache rewrite rules, or use CUrlManager provided in Yii.
You can also use Apache rewrite rules to achieve the same goal.
Note, however, that CUrlManager manages URLs in two directions, i.e., parsing URLs and creating URLs. Apache rewrite rules (and the routing system in many other PHP frameworks) work only in one direction, i.e., parsing URLs.
The rules are evaluated in the order they are listed.
Because this rule matches everything, it effectively disables access to any other features. Therefore, in front of this rule, you should have some other rules.
