Welcome to Instant Yii 1.1 Application Development Starter. This book has been designed as a crash course in web application development with the Yii Framework. You will learn a step-by-step approach to building database-driven websites utilizing the features and extensions available in Yii.

This book contains the following sections:

So, what is Yii? – In this section, we'll start with a short review of what the Yii framework is, how it got started, and the overall benefits you'll get when you start using it.

Installation – In this section, we'll install Yii Framework and kickstart your first "Hello World" application with it.

Quick start – Given the automatically-generated example application, we extend it to be a rudimentary blog according to the blog example from the Yii website, while also learning a lot of the most important concepts in Yii along the way.

Top 5 features you need to know about – In this section, we continue the practical examples and we explore some not so obvious details and tricks of the framework, which can really help you in developing your application.

People and places – Lastly, we'll see where to seek help and how to get to know the quite vast Yii community.