I’ve been approached several times in the past few months from companies in Australia looking for Yii developers, so its definitely picking up.
If you are developing with Yii now, then good… get as many solid project out the door as you can… in time companies will snatch you up for very good dollars.
from all comment on current topic i don’t know am rite or wrong but i conclude the common intention of every users is,
From past short time major companies in all countries implement on Yii framework and looking for Yii developer and many poster in current topic want to present that Yii community had to take opportunity and had to make Community more stronger ( Don’t know how… with using powerful extension support, Yii certification, Enterprise support or anything else… … .) as Yii had full featured and people behind the scenes working hard in framework development.
Well, besides certification and commercial support (both will require lots of time we need for Yii2 currently) you can help us by spreading the word about Yii. Blog posts, conferences, articles, user groups. All these will help us a lot.
currently the word Yii is growing faster, and hope after gr8 effort by Yii community and Yii2 release the word will be something different… 
again gr8 thankx to all people involving in Yii development to develop such a nice thing.
cheers…
in addition to the above we can’t have Yii as a trademark (http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/12/15/zii-yii-and-oii-among-trademarks-filed-by-nintendo/) not sure if this would have any impact on the planned commercial support for ver. 2
I also agree with parts of Bettor and Sampa.
And no matter how vivid the community is, apparantly it’s still mainly used in Asia, Russia and so…
The amount of companies asking for Yii devs over in Europe and U.S.A. are very rare.
Zend might have a different background etc, but according to what I see, this is one of the most widely used frameworks.
It doesn’t matter if it’s root are somewhere else. If the companies don’t know about Yii and are demanding Zend,
you don’t have much of a case with Yii, or any other.
It may so that the Yii community is alive, but it might be a good idea and a way to convince new people if others would start do to tutorials in English.
They might just reach much more people who are trying to choose among Cake, CodeIgniter, Symphony and so.
Part of the success of a framework lies in spreading the word and getting other people to like it.