We are very pleased to announce the release candidate of Yii Framework version 1.1.14. You can download it at GitHub.

In this release, we fixed more than 80 bugs and introduced more than 60 minor enhancements and features. We added CPasswordHelper that provides secure and up to date way to store and verify password hashes; We added CRedisCache to support using Redis for caching purpose; and Yii can now be installed as a Composer package. For the complete list of changes in this release, please see the change log.

We have received significant contributions to this release from our community users (e.g. creocoder, tom--, paystey, Ragazzo, antoncpu, Yiivgeny) to this release. We hereby thank their effort in making this release available.

Since this is a release candidate (RC), please do not use it for production. We will make a stable release of 1.1.14 in the next few weeks. Before that happens, please help us test this RC and report to us any issues you find. Thank you.

Below we summarize the main enhancements introduced in this release:

New helper class CPasswordHelper ¶

CPasswordHelper that provides secure and up to date way to store and verify password hashes. Usage is extremely easy:

// generate hash that will be stored to DB, $password is from accout creation form
$hash = CPasswordHelper::hashPassword($password);

// $hash is what we've saved to DB, $password is from login form
if (CPasswordHelper::verifyPassword($password, $hash)
  // password is good
else
  // password is bad

New method CDbCommandBuilder::createMultipleInsertCommand() ¶

There's now CDbCommandBuilder::createMultipleInsertCommand() to support insertion of multiple records in a single query:

$builder=Yii::app()->db->schema->commandBuilder;
$command=$builder->createMultipleInsertCommand('tbl_post', array(
  array('title' => 'record 1', 'text' => 'text1'),
  array('title' => 'record 2', 'text' => 'text2'),
));
$command->execute();

New cache component CRedisCache ¶

You can now configure application to use Redis as cache backend via protected/config/main.php, components section:

array(
  // ...
  'components'=>array(
    'cache'=>array(
      'class'=>'CRedisCache',
      'hostname'=>'localhost',
      'port'=>6379,
      'database'=>0,
    ),
  ),
)

Installing Yii as a Composer package: ¶

Yii is now can be installed using Composer by adding the following to composer.json.

"yiisoft/yii": "dev-master"

Logging out a user after specified time ¶

If you need a user to be logged out after specified time was passed regardless of his activity you now can use:

// ...
  'components'=>array(
    'user'=>array(
      // ...
      'absoluteAuthTimeout' => 60*60*24;
    ),
  ),
)

RANGE support for file downloading ¶

When using CHttpRequest::sendFile Yii is now responding to RANGE requests. That means faster downloads when client is using multiple threads to download multiple parts of the file.

Using through option with BELONGS_TO ¶

"through" option can now be used with CActiveRecord::BELONGS_TO. For details check the guide.

Selective logging of global variables ¶

CLogFilter::$logVars can now be array of arrays intended for designating particular items of the $GLOBALS. For example,

'components'=>array(
		'log'=>array(
			'class'=>'CLogRouter',
			'routes'=>array(
				array(
					'class'=>'system.logging.CWebLogRoute',
					'filter'=>array(
						'class'=>'system.logging.CLogFilter',
						'logVars'=>array(
							'_COOKIE', // old syntax, < 1.1.14
							array('_SERVER','REMOTE_ADDR'), // new syntax, >= 1.1.14
							array('_SERVER','HTTP_USER_AGENT'), // new syntax, >= 1.1.14
						),
					),
				),
			),
		),
	),

The configuration shown above would log this:

$_COOKIE=array (
  '__utma' => '111872281.473431406.1366046648.1366046648.1366046648.1',
  '__utmz' => '111872281.1366046648.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)',
  'cartVisible' => '1',
  '96ab4aec0c2977c9b793d4ba009eb3ce' => '...',
  'PHPSESSID' => 'vb8pk7obs3q2lc7bl8ield7si7',
)

$_SERVER.REMOTE_ADDR='::1'

$_SERVER.HTTP_USER_AGENT='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0'

New formatter CLocalizedFormatter ¶

The new formatter class CLocalizedFormatter allows formatting values according to current locale. For example,

'components'=>array(
	'format'=>array(
		'class'=>'system.utils.CLocalizedFormatter',
		'locale'=>'en_US',
	),
	'germanFormat'=>array(
		'class'=>'system.utils.CLocalizedFormatter',
		'locale'=>'de_DE',
	),
	'russianFormat'=>array(
		'class'=>'system.utils.CLocalizedFormatter',
		'locale'=>'ru_RU',
	),
),

echo Yii::app()->format->formatDatetime(time()) . "\n";
echo Yii::app()->germanFormat->formatDatetime(time()) . "\n";
echo Yii::app()->russianFormat->formatDatetime(time()) . "\n";

// Expected result/output:
// Jul 7, 2013 9:34:56 PM
// 07.07.2013 21:34:56
// 07.07.2013, 21:34:56

Generating attribute labels from column comments ¶

Gii is now able to use table columns' comments as the attribute labels of a new generated model. For example, if a table is defined as follows,

CREATE TABLE `tbl_user` (
  `id`  int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `first_name` varchar(100) NOT NULL COMMENT 'Имя:',
  `last_name` varchar(100) NOT NULL COMMENT 'Nachname:',
  `title` varchar(50) NOT NULL COMMENT 'Title (e.g. Mr., Mrs., etc.):',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

The generated attributeLabels method would be (in case the option "Use Column Comments as Attribute Labels" in Gii is checked):

/**
 * @return array customized attribute labels (name=>label)
 */
public function attributeLabels()
{
	return array(
		'id' => 'ID',
		'first_name' => 'Имя:',
		'last_name' => 'Nachname:',
		'title' => 'Title (e.g. Mr., Mrs., etc.):',
	);
}

New methods in CSecurityManager ¶

The following new methods are available in CSecurityManager:

• CSecurityManager::generateSessionRandomBlock(): generates random bytes based on the current user session.
• CSecurityManager::generatePseudoRandomBlock(): better and more reliable alternative to mt_rand().
• CSecurityManager::generateRandomBytes(): generates random binary data. Cryptographical strong characteristic is changeable via second argument. Note, cryptographically strong random generation process is relatively slow.
• CSecurityManager::generateRandomString(): generates random string. Cryptographical strong characteristic is changeable via second argument. Note, cryptographically strong random generation process is relatively slow.