The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0

Url Helper

Url helper provides a set of static methods for managing URLs.

Html helper

Every web application generates lots of HTML markup. If the markup is static, it can be done efficiently by mixing PHP and HTML in a single file, but when it is generated dynamically it starts to get tricky to handle it without extra help. Yii provides such help in the form of an Html helper, which provides a set of static methods for handling commonly used HTML tags, their options, and their content.

ArrayHelper

Additionally to the rich set of PHP array functions, the Yii array helper provides extra static methods allowing you to deal with arrays more efficiently.

Helpers

Note: This section is under development.

Yii provides many classes that help simplify common coding tasks, such as string or array manipulations, HTML code generation, and so on. These helper classes are organized under the yii\helpers namespace and are all static classes (meaning they contain only static properties and methods and should not be instantiated).

JUI Extension for Yii 2

This is the jQuery UI extension for Yii 2. It encapsulates jQuery UI widgets as Yii widgets, and makes using jQuery UI widgets in Yii applications extremely easy.

Twitter Bootstrap Extension for Yii 2

The extension includes support for the Bootstrap 3 markup and components framework (also known as "Twitter Bootstrap"). Bootstrap is an excellent, responsive framework that can greatly speed up the client-side of your development process.

Using Yii as a Micro-framework

Yii can be easily used without the features included in basic and advanced templates. In other words, Yii is already a micro-framework. It is not required to have the directory structure provided by templates to work with Yii.

Working with Third-Party Code

From time to time, you may need to use some third-party code in your Yii applications. Or you may want to use Yii as a library in some third-party systems. In this section, we will show how to achieve these goals.

Using template engines

By default, Yii uses PHP as its template language, but you can configure Yii to support other rendering engines, such as Twig or Smarty available as extensions.

The view component is responsible for rendering views. You can add a custom template engine by reconfiguring this component's behavior: