In this chapter, we're going to have an overview of Yii 2, what has changed since the last version, with which you might have become comfortable its new directory structure and organization, as well as its new features and niceties.
We cannot introduce Yii 2 without looking at Composer, a new way to organize and extend your projects in PHP.
Once we have had a look at all the basic tools we're going to use, let's review our plan and consider what we will be working on in the rest of this book: user authentication REST interface and user login from a modal window.
In order to start working on our features, we need to step aside and review our plan from a project management and quality assurance point of view, that is, introduce the master test plan. In other words, we need to consider what we are going to test and how much before undertaking the actual implementation work.
We will be working through the following steps:
- Downloading and installing Yii 2
- Finding your way around Yii 2
- Defining our working strategy
- Introducing testing for our purposes
If you've worked with Yii in the past, be prepared. The new version of Yii 2 can be considered as a brand new framework, modern and robust.
Yii 2 takes a long-awaited step forward in the right direction. It is the result of several years of work, done collaboratively on the Internet, mostly on GitHub (https://github.com/yiisoft/yii2), by developers from different parts of the world.
As a user of Yii, you can collaborate too, by simply filing bug reports, feature requests at https://github.com/yiisoft/yii2/issues, polishing off the documentation and translations, and creating new extensions and features for review and inclusion on the project. There are also many other non-officially supported subprojects that can benefit from your support: some already there for you to use, and some that you may have written yourself.