Some people know that I’ve been working on a web game that I plan to integrate with Facebook. The initial prototype took a few weeks of halfhearted hacking and thrashing around between PHP and MySql, getting used to LAMP style programming again. I got a working proof of concept up and running and started making notes of what really needed to be done to make it work. Then, I admitted to myself that I was making a giant mess that I would not be able to build on for very long.
I looked around for a PHP framework to make things easier. Something scalable and lightweight, but sensible and clear. I found the Yii framework after peeking at CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I chose Yii because it seemed to make sense to me at first glance. I was able to get my model defined and had CRUD stuff up and running in no time at all.