I've used Yii in a few projects and it's probably the most underrated and least known mature PHP framework out there. Amazingly well organized, documented and powerful. I'm always a little disappointed when a new PHP framework pops up and gets all the attention while not even achieving 20% of Yii's feature set.
Seconded; after an extensive comparison over a year ago, Yii is now my framework of choice on any PHP project, and I haven't regretted that choice a single time since. It's fast, powerful, extensible and well documented.
As for English documentation, their guide [1] as well as their main tutorial [2] are in English and are written and structured better than the documentation for almost all other frameworks I looked at.
I agree there; somehow I got the feeling that mostly Chinese and Russian folks are using it, meaning that up-to-date resources/tutorials in English are limited.
One of the major things in v1.x that put me off from feeling too comfortable with it was the lack of coding standards - naming conventions, spacing etc. This might be personal, but to me that was one of the little annoying things that didn't really let me make the switch completely.
v2[1] addressed these things which may lead to a better adoption. It looks pretty promising, but it will need more time to become stable.
While there are significant numbers of Chinese and Russian Yii developers, it's always been an English first project, all documentation is in English (as well as other languages) and almost all 3rd party extensions are written in English too.
Regarding coding standards, Yii 1.x code does indeed have quite a cramped style and this (afaik) was never documented, it was more of an informal agreement between contributors to maintain a consistent feel. But why did you find this a barrier for entry when writing applications on top of it? It's only whitespace and of course, you're free to use your own conventions in your own code.
The best example is the fact that the first (and the only AFAIK) conference was held in Ukraine and most of the coverage was available in either Russian or Ukrainian. There were slides in English, but noone was writing additionally about it in other languages.
Also, while the site and official docs are in English, adoption of a framework is greatly influenced by the people who are blogging about it. I found many devs actively writing about Yii in Russian/Chinese, while the English sources were either outdated or ended up on "Let's build a helloworld app with Yii" or comparing Yii's performance with Cake/CI/Symfony/potato.
Regarding coding standards - this is personal and of course you can change it, but to me it was a sign of ignorance and reminded me of sloppy coding. Whenever I do something through gii (code generator) I had to do a few rounds of replaces to format everything the way I want.
Doesn't influence anything directly, but is damn annoying.
Ok I see your point regarding the conference, that was a bit annoying for me too.
I'm still confused about your coding standards point, considering that the core framework is pretty consistent, just that those standards are mostly not written down. Also, for future reference, you can copy the Gii templates and edit them for your needs, the default templates are simply meant as reasonably sensible defaults.
Regarding the coding standards - I meant on these things: no spaces after/before '=>'/ or dots for concatenating strings, mixing camel and snake cases sometimes, naming of certain classes/methods weren't so clear etc.
Thanks for the Gii templates; will definitely have a look at that.
I've written a lot on Yii/Heroku if you care to look: http://aaronfrancis.com/?tag=Yii. I love Yii, it's certainly my go-to for PHP frameworks at this point. It's super powerful.
It's been more than a year since I was programming php daily, but I used cake and yii back to back then for similar projects, and I felt yii was significantly better. It's also much faster iirc. Not an answer to your question, I know, but fwiw...
Yii is cool, it's one of the most mature and opiniated PHP frameworks out there. I wish their Active Record implementation was available elsewhere as well.
We are using this for our web and backend at Lifebit and i can confirm this makes PHP development so much more enjoyable. We have tried Code Igniter, CakePHP and a bunch of others. Has the right mix of community, documentation, weight, speed and code commits activity.
Because people upvoted it. Also this is a relatively significant release with some important new features, e.g. redis cache support and password helpers
