Creating a view to display a news list

Now, we will create a simple news list in a view named itemsList. We will point to this view from NewsController, so we have to:

Now, open basic/views/news/itemsList.php, create an array with a list of data and display the output with a simple table of items:

<?php
    $newsList = [
        [ 'title' => 'First World War', 'date' => '1914-07-28' ],
        [ 'title' => 'Second World War', 'date' => '1939-09-01' ],
        [ 'title' => 'First man on the moon', 'date' => '1969-07-20' ]
    ];
?>

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Title</th>
        <th>Date</th>
    </tr>
    <?php foreach($newsList as $item) { ?>
    <tr>
        <td><?php echo $item['title'] ?></td>
        <td><?php echo $item['date'] ?></td>
    </tr>
    <?php } ?>
</table>

Then, we need to create an action provided by a function named actionItemsList that will be rendered by http://hostname/basic/web/index.php?r=news/items-list.

The function to append in the NewsController class is as follows:

public function actionItemsList()
{
     return $this->render('itemsList');
}

The render() method that belongs to \yii\web\Controller, displays in the layout content of the view passed as the first parameter. When the framework is looking for the view, it will append .php extension to the name passed as the first parameter of the render() method and it will look for it in basic/view/news. The last member of the path is the name that is calling the render() method.

Now, we can point to http://hostname/basic/web/index.php?r=news/items-list, to see our beautiful table!