Yes, it is Yii - PHP5 framework

Yes, it is Yii - a high-performance component-based PHP framework aimed at developing large-scale Web applications. Yii PHP framework works with PHP 5 and is one of the latest developments in the framework market.

It seems that Yii is relatively easy to learn; although there is relatively little documentation available for such a recent model. Smashing Magazine has listed Yii Framework as one of the 50 Extremely Useful PHP Help,resources.

Web 2.0 widgets

Yii has a decent set of features by default, including MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, jQuery-based AJAX support, authentication and role-based access control (RBAC), scaffolding, input validation, widgets, events, themes and Web services. Yii is written in strict OOP, making it easy to use and flexible and easily extensible. Yii provides Web 2.0 widgets such as auto-complete input fields. Yii uses JQuery for Javascript, Database Access Objects (DAO), Active Record, and supports third-party extensions.

Clear Model View Controller implementation

Phased on the the MVC architecture, Yii uses the "convention over configuration" model. A request always goes through the convention index.php?r=controllerId/actionId. A call like index.php?r=Article/List will start the Article controller and initiate the List action ( ArticleController::actionList() ). The actionList method will normally call a model to manipulate data, run business logic on it and then render a View to show the result.

If the call is invalid or if the action in the url is not passed, the controller will start with the default action. If no controller is specified either the default siteController will be started.

Open to include third-party code

Developers can incorporate existing third-party code such as Zend Framework, VOSBA or PEAR into a Yii application. Yii has a library with a growing list of extension modules contributed by the community.

Experiences live test (yii-1.0.8.r1317)

1. download & unpack
2. run test
3. further programming

Creating the test application to conform README initially failed due to permissions issue. For an experienced PHP developer, this is quickly resolved. In our case, it was caused by a tighter security regime that we operate on our servers. After we granted the correct execution permissions the Yii installation script was allowed to do its work.

The structure of our test application was neatly generated ready for further programming.

Immediately it is actually usable. Everything created works and is accessible. Of course, the application doesn't quite do what we want yet, but are we developers for that?