Why Yii is the best PHP Framework

• Yii is easy

To run a Yii-powered web application, all you need is the core framework files and

a web server supporting PHP 5.1.0 or higher. To develop with Yii, you only need to

know PHP and object-oriented programming(OOP). You are not required to learn

any new configuration or templating language. Building a Yii application mainly

involves writing and maintaining your own custom PHP classes, some of which

will extend from the core Yii Framework component classes.

Yii incorporates many of the great ideas and work from other well-known web

programming frameworks and applications. So, if you are coming to Yii after

using other web development frameworks, it is likely you will find it familiar

and easy to navigate.

• Yii is efficient

Yii is a high-performance component-based framework for developing web

applications on any scale. It encourages maximum code reuse in web programming,

and can significantly accelerate the development process. As mentioned previously,

if you stick with Yii's built-in conventions, you can get your application up and

running with little to no manual configuration.

Yii is also designed to help you with DRY development. DRY (Don't Repeat

Yourself) is a key concept of agile application development. All Yii applications

are built using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Yii enforces

this development pattern by providing a place to keep each piece of your MVC

code. This minimizes duplication and helps promote code reuse and ease of

maintainability. The less code you need to write, the less time it takes to get your

application to market. Similarly, the easier it is to maintain your application, the

longer it will stay on the market.

• Yii is extensible

Yii has been carefully designed to allow nearly every piece of its code to be extended

and customized to meet almost any need or requirement. In fact, it is difficult not to

take advantage of Yii's ease of extensibility as a primary activity when developing a

Yii-driven application, which is extending the core framework classes. If you want

to turn your extended code into useful tools for other developers to use, Yii provides

easy-to-follow steps and guidelines to help you create such third-party extensions.

This allows you to contribute to Yii's ever-growing list of features and actively

participate in extending Yii itself.

What is also remarkable about Yii is its ease of use, superior performance, and its

depth of extensibility which does not come at the cost of sacrificing features. Yii is

packed with features to help you meet those high demands placed on today's web

applications. AJAX-enabled widgets, web service integration, enforcement of an

MVC architecture, DAO and relational Active Record database layer, sophisticated

caching, hierarchical role-based access control, theming, internationalization (I18N),

and localization (L10N), are just the tip of the Yii iceberg. As of version 1.1, the

core framework is now packaged with an official extension library called Zii. These

extensions are developed and maintained by the core framework team members

who continue to extend Yii's core feature set. With a deep community of users who

are also contributing by writing Yii extensions, the overall feature set available to

a Yii powered application is growing daily. For a complete list of all available user

contributed extensions, see http://www.yiiframework.com/extensions/.

• MVC architecture

Yii is an MVC framework and it provides an explicit folder structure for each piece of model, view, and controller code. Before we start building our first Yii application, we need to define a few key terms, and look at how Yii implements and enforces this MVC architecture.

There you have it! All the reasons,but there is some more, why you need yii for your php projects next article is on installing and configuring yii coming up shortly.