One of the things that helped me out the most when I was learning Yii was their series on YouTube called Yii Developer’s Tutorial. I kind of stumbled across it when I was searching for help on getting started. Unfortunately all the videos in the series didn’t seem to be listed anywhere. They were spread across 2 different peoples YouTube channels so it meant using the search engine to find the next episode! I thought I’d group them together for you, like I did for the Armstrong & Miller - WWII RAF Sketches.

1. Introduction: Concepts, MVC architecture and Active Records. Part 1
   

2. Setting up your development environment. Part 2.1 Part 2.2 Part 2.3

3. Creating your first Yii application. Generate Controllers, Views and Models via Gii. Connect to database. Friendly URLs. Part 3.1 Part 3.2 Part 3.3 Part 3.4

4. Yii Architectural Review. Yii is scalable, supports CRUD actions, MVC but is not classed as an enterprise application framework because it doesn’t support transactions, no business rules or constraints, no workflow control. Part 4

There is a another set of vids (showing my age there!) can be found on Yii’s website in the screencasts section. These start with showing how a controller can write Hello World on the screen and go through the steps of getting Hello World from the database.