I guess this will not be the first nor the last text comparing those two frameworks, but I got so amazed with Yii that I have to write it.

Let’s be clear, CodeIgniter is just a little bit more of a simple MVC framework. Yii is a complete web-development framework used for rapid web application development. Let’s compare them in detail…

CodeIgniter is great for beginners. If you barely have a clue what MVC stands for, I highly recommend it. It features great tutorials and is super-easy to learn. If you want to learn what MVC is and how to use it, take a look at CodeIgniter video tutorials. CodeIgniter enables you to go into coding really fast and create basic stuff quickly. But, that’s all. It’s great to learn MVC, and it works fine even for large websites. However, you have to do a lot of things by hand. If you’re experienced PHP developer you might even be used to that and you won’t see anything missing in CodeIgniter.

I built a couple of websites using CodeIgniter, most visited on is slagalica.tv with about 30k visits/day.

From 2009 on I was testing Yii, but I only got to use it for the real project last month. Be prepared, if you are not experienced with MVC frameworks, you might find the learning curve really steep. Yii is very powerful, but to harness the power you need to learn all the features and the way stuff is done in yii. Instead of just going in and coding, take some time to read the docs, wiki and create some simple small project to learn it. Whenever you are doing something that seems like too much manual work, look for ready-made yii-way solution.

So, what makes Yii so much better? I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just enumerate:

1. Gii code generator. Gii can create template models, views, controllers and forms. The special case CRUD really makes it stand out. You simply give it the database table name, and it creates model with all the attributes. You just define data type (numeric, etc.) whether field is required, and those rules get applied ALWAYS when you try to save/update the data. In CodeIgniter, you need to validate it on each action. The difference is that CodeIgniter is form-oriented while Yii is data-oriented
2. Form handling. Gii generated forms use “active” fields. This means that when some field is not validated, yii would display the same form to fix the problem with all the data filled in
3. HTML Grid component. Enables to display data in tabular way with automatic sorting, paging, coloring of even and odd rows, etc.
4. jQuery integration. This means that stuff like date-picker or auto-complete input boxes are usually one line of PHP code and Yii spits out all the required Javascript, HTML and CSS code.
5. Translations. Creating multilingual websites in Yii is really easy. With CodeIgniter you would have to create your own way of doing it.
6. Database relations. Yii supports lazy loading. This means that you don’t have to write JOINs each time you need to get a value of related table (for example: name of author of a blog post). If you have a ActiveRecord instance of blog post as $post, you simply refer to author’s name like this: $post->author->name. Yii would execute the needed SQL to get it.
7. Consistency. Yii is much better choice if you have multiple developers working on the project. Yii introduces rules how stuff should be done, and there is no reinventing the whell. This means that all developers create the code that others can pick up easily.

Example of site I’m building using Yii: setlopta.com. There’s a link to English version in top-right corner.