One of my biggest issues with the Yii site is the search functionality. It is probably the worse search feature I’ve seen. I tip my hat to the site-wide search coming back with results in different categories, but, in particular, the forum search always gives me results which have little or nothing to do with my topic. I’m curious why this is so bad. Also, on the site-wide search, forum links do not go straight to the post, but rather to the main forum page. This just doesn’t make any sense.
The other thing I want to bring up is in another post today. This is the lack of examples. What can we do to get more examples in Yii? Ideally, we should post short samples in the API comments similar to php.net. This would help tremendously. Simply stating what parameters is not useful unless you can see the range of possible values.
Somewhat related to examples is my problem with knowing what extensions to pick from. Now that we have zii, does that make all other extensions deprecated? I don’t see this being clearly explained anywhere.
That said, I still love Yii and have no intention of not using it. I just want to make it a better experience.
Regarding forum search, the forum defaults to sorting by ‘last update time’, I always change it to ‘relevance’ to get better results.
As for examples, the extensions make quite a good reference for widgets etc. I agree that it would be good to have more small working examples on specific topics, but there are plenty of snippets you can look at on this forum.
As for Zii vs user extensions, it seems to me that Zii is in its infancy but will eventually become a great resource. User extensions need some time and effort to evaluate and/or modify. I think its best to try making some simple ones of your own first to see how its done and then use that knowledge when choosing extensions.
Yeah, that helps big time. Didn’t notice this little feature. Now if we could just solve why search result links to forum posts don’t go through, I’d be even happier.
As for examples, I hope as the community grows, people will start posting examples somewhere. Whether this be in the API comments as I suggest (to be like php.net) or possibly a new forum section. Or maybe I’ll start an unofficial repository for examples, something like yiiexamples.com. I’d do it, but I would want to make sure everyone was on board with posting examples in the same place.
So if zii is still maturing, that makes my selections more difficult. I want to use the best/newest methods, but it would be nice to know if say a particular user extension is being replaced or not.
I like your idea with api comments like on php.net. But it should be moderated so no questions are asked there (questions should belong to the cookbook and forum). Also it should be only used for small examples and tips. Cookbook is for big explanations, tutorials and so on.
Also note that qiang is working on a new Yii website. So I guess we will see some enhancements soon anyway.
The cookbook might actually be the place. I sorta forgot about it since it has a limited, almost fixed set of items. If we could submit items to add to the cookbook pending moderation, that would be great… if we can all add a few items from our trials.
Oh ok, I was wondering about that, but hadn’t looked into it specifically. Now we just gotta motivate more people to share their examples and we’re good.
Someone already started a cookbook with examples (CHtml): http://www.yiiframew…oc/cookbook/48/
But a nice demo site showing every feature/widget in action would be really nice. Should be obligatory for authors to also supply a demo for that site when creating an extension/component.
