• Yii2 added to Scrutinizer-CI. Feel a power in your arms to make code smells better? Come on, investigate reports and contribute.
• First draf of REST api implementation from Qiang. See the code, read docs, make your suggestions ! It is not in master yet, but it has a lot of features implemented - quick prototyping, routing by HTTP verbs, authorization, HATEOAS etc.
• New look for a framework documentation. Combined with Class References. Now it's easier to read.
• Help needed to enhance api doc generator
• Help needed to fix issues in Yii2 to work with HHVM
• Support for fetching Query results in Batches. Very usefull when working with big data sets. Here is the docs for this
• Support for Nested Transactions
• Big change in Custom Scopes handling for ActiveRelation. Now additional Query class should be made per AR model if you want to have custom scopes.
• Fixed syntax consistency in Html::a, createUrl, redirect etc. At last ! :)
• Pjax widget. Allows to add Ajax update to other widgets or any form/link inside it and changes url in browser via pushState.
• GridView supports update via pjax
• Added getIsPjax method and HTTP_X_PJAX header

• Special method renderAjax > This method is similar to renderPartial() except that it will inject into the rendering result with JS/CSS scripts and files which are registered with the view. For this reason, you should use this method instead of renderPartial() to render a view to respond to an AJAX request

• Added support to parse JSON request data to Request::getRestParams()

• "DB attributes" or "virtual properties" discussion. In the end there will not be any kind of that > You are currently able to add public properties which are not stored in db but you can validate them. This is done in advanced app with password field. Attributes are fields that are stored in db, public properties are not, but both can be validated.

• Yii2 extension manager GUI (work in progress)

• Yii2 extension generator in Gii module
• Bundled behaviors refactoring. AttributeStampBehavior, BlameableBehavior, TimestampBehavior. Also a proposal for a set of other behaviors like "SoftDelete", "Translatable" tec.
• Workflow for embedded documents usage in MongoDB ActiveRecord. I have had an experience workign with Mongo and embedded docs in Yii1 and I must say it's a pain in any case and require manual work
• New Fixtures handling - as classes, with dependencies, initialiser etc.
• Added ability to downgrade migrations by their absolute apply time
• Update for debug toolbar UI

• Markdown extension from @cebe is now added as official one. I must say that's awesome work, and already really looks like introduced : > All existing implementations are either slow or not extensible so I decided to combine these two factors in a new implementation.

• Docs : Using Yii in 3rd-Party Systems

• DynamicModel - model class primarily used to support ad-hoc data validation

   $model = DynamicModel::validateData(compact('name', 'email'), [
  [['name', 'email'], 'string', 'max' => 128]],
  ['email', 'email'],
  ]);
  

It has been a long time without a big update here, but not today. Today is the release day :)

• Blog now support 3 languages - English (default), Russian and German. Now I will try to make all big posts in Russian too. German - is for my self motivation. In some time I should get enough knowledge of this great language to write IT post in it.
• Posts and Notes are translated using different techniques in Yii2, it was a good experience
• Share buttons - I have tried to make very light widget without tonnes of JS. Btw. need to prettify it and post to packagist.
• Kudos - these cool smileys in the bottom on full text of the article. Don't know why, but I like it, just a quick and lazy "Thank you" button. Made it with localStorage to store vote status, so it does not pollute requests with Cookies. Also should be on packagist soon.
• Automated deploy script - thanks to Davert and his Robo. As you can see on screenshot - it works. And I will definitely use it in future.
• Lots of fixes inside and in HTML layout, but who cares ... :)

Faker is a library that provide a set of generators for data types like fake name, address, number, IP, email, lorem ipsum text etc. - all generic data that is needed to create semi-real database content. Usually it has variations for different popular languages. All data is human-readable and taken from library, a lot of different combinations creates semi-unique data set.

It is needed mostly on testing and demonstration stages. Nobody likes to see a list of users like "test1", "Johnny35" etc. with posts "Test1", "Another test 35".

Implementation

• PHP
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• Perl
• Python

PHP usage example

$faker = Faker\Factory::create();

// generate data by accessing properties
echo $faker->name;
  // 'Lucy Cechtelar';
echo $faker->address;
  // "426 Jordy Lodge
  // Cartwrightshire, SC 88120-6700"
echo $faker->text;
  // Sint velit eveniet. Rerum atque repellat voluptatem quia rerum. Numquam excepturi
  // beatae sint laudantium consequatur. Magni occaecati itaque sint et sit tempore. Nesciunt ...

for ($i=0; $i < 5; $i++) {
  echo $faker->name, "\n";
}
  // Adaline Reichel
  // Dr. Santa Prosacco DVM
  // Noemy Vandervort V
  // Lexi O'Conner
  // Gracie Weber

NB! Yii2 Framework has a Faker fixtures extensions

What is it? Why do I need it?

Have you ever made big server side application with wide technologies and software stack in a team ? Or have you tried to connect quickly to an "old" backend project and bring some help? Or maybe one of your colleagues had ever said to you "hey, that script/soft is not working on my machine..." but you don't understand what is wrong and can't reproduce it. If yes - then you know this pain :

• you have Windows PC, but want to develop webapp on Linux server
• usually only some member of a team is a good sysadmin and he is responsible for setup and configuration, during development software stack is changing or require update etc. and every member of a team need to make it by himself on his localhosts
• you are contributing to different projects and need quickly switch between then - but these projects require different versions of some software like PHP or MySQL and can't co-exist with each other
• you often work on different laptops etc. and don't want to pollute all of them with server-stack software
• you need to track versioning of you dev server environment and should be able to checkout not only app code to some moment of time, but server also
• new member came to your team and you need to setup a full local dev environment in a minutes and for sure without "oh, really I forget this one ..."

We are lucky as now Vagrant exist to solve it. Literally Vagrant is a software that could setup you a local (or cloud) dev Virtual server using a configuration file. So it could be tracked as a project file inside Git repo. It can make server provisioning using Shell script or Ansible, Chef, Puppet.
Anyone, anywhere, anytime could run one terminal command to get their own local dev environment that is exact copy of your own - reliable, reproducible and for sure.

Vagrant has quite good documentation and you should definitely go through it. Here I will juts cover briefly all major points.

Install Vagrant in Ubuntu

It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. But all examples here assume Ubuntu Linux as Host and Virtual machine.

• Download latest Vagrant .deb from official download page
• Install this .deb with Package manager
• Make sure VirtualBox+Extension Pack is also installed (VirtualBox is used for running local virtual machines)

Quick start : Vagrantfile - The Journey Begins...

just 2 simple terminal commands ~~~ $ vagrant init precise32 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box $ vagrant up ~~~

First command will create a Vagrantfile file in this dir and this config will be predefined ~~~ ... config.vm.box = "precise32" config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box" ... ~~~ now running vagrant up will actually start VirualBox instance according to Vagrantfile in current directory. In our case it will download Ubuntu 12.04 box from internet and run it/
Vagrantfile contain all settings for our server.
You can think running a VirtualBox is a big performance overhead for a dev server - but I think it is not. At least it is reliable price for a full isolation of environment. Plus don't forget that we are running server version of Linux without GUI - so 512 Mb Ram and some CPU time will be quite enough for a dev machine.

• People are contributing quite a lot of messages translation. Have a look and make pull request with your native language! Hey, Klingonians, where are you ! :)
• CONTRIBUTING.md appeared in Yii2 repo. With main links to contribution instructions.
• Draft implementation of REST component/controller, discussion around it. Personally I am very intersted in (REST)API support as I am dealing with (creating) a lot of them in my work. And I am looking forward whay will be proposed by @qiangxue.
• Once again started discussion about separating “attributes” and “DB attributes” for ActiveRecord or having some "data-mapper"-like approach in AR. This topic is very interesting and non-trivial, suggest you to get into it.
• Added support for installing packages conforming to PSR-4 standard, also all packages migrated to PSR-4 folder structure
• Debug module remade to use GridView + ArrayDataProvider also a lot of visual enhancements were made.
• Added support for retrieving sub-array element or child object property through ArrayHelper::getValue(). Very handy and removes boilerplate isset checks.
• API docs generator ready. Here are docs for a framework and for extensions
• Added Image Helper based on Imageine - that's really long awaited thing !
• jQuery 2.0 now distributed with Yii2 by default, but it is still being discussed
• Added postgresql QueryBuilder::checkIntegrity and QueryBuilder::resetSequence usefull for Postgres fuxtures.
• NO plans to adopt PSR-3 compliant logger class
• Charset is now explicitly set to UTF-8 when serving JSON
• Discussion on test additions - AspectMock not included, Specify included. Personally I like Specify sugar very much.
• DOCS - i18n in views
• Faker fixture generator integrated and DOC for Fixtures
• Codeception tests added to bacis app
• AuthClient Extension usage documentation
• DICSUSSION - Display current routes
• More thougnts on Admin Panel for advanced app
• Added support for building "EXISTS" and "NOT EXISTS" query conditions
• MongoDB Session class and MongoDB Cache class
• HHVM support of Yii2 is being evaluated, not perfect yet.
• Started docs for integration Yii2 with 3rd party libraries : Using Yii in 3rd-Party Systems, Using Yii2 with Yii1.
• DISCUSSION : Fixtures as classes with custom initialisers. It could open wide possibilities like fixture dependecy, complex DB structures creation before adding fixture data in db etc.