How many of us wonder how we can upgrade the website without hurting the operation of our WebApp?

Even if we put new functionality, change the look and feel of the UI, fixed some bugs just discover and even if we upgrade the core (Yii Framework itself).

I come up to the idea of remodifying the file structure of the Yii.

Default Structure of the Yii Framework:

assets/
css/
framework/
images/
protected/
themes/
index.php

All we need is to transfer the outer folder of the default file structure of Yii Framework.

In our index.php code, we have:

<?php
// change the following paths if necessary
$yii=dirname(__FILE__).'/framework/yii.php';
$config=dirname(__FILE__).'/protected/config/main.php';

// remove the following lines when in production mode
defined('YII_DEBUG') or define('YII_DEBUG',true);

// specify how many levels of call stack should be shown in each log message
defined('YII_TRACE_LEVEL') or define('YII_TRACE_LEVEL',3);

require_once($yii);
Yii::createWebApplication($config)->run();

We can actually remodify it like this:

assets/
css/
yii/
	1.1.8/  	
images/
webapp/
	1.0/
themes/
index.php

In our index.php with the implementation of the modified file structure:

<?php
// change the following paths if necessary
$yii=dirname(__FILE__).'/yii/1.1.8/yii.php';
$config=dirname(__FILE__).'/webapp/1.0/config/main.php';

// remove the following lines when in production mode
defined('YII_DEBUG') or define('YII_DEBUG',true);

// specify how many levels of call stack should be shown in each log message
defined('YII_TRACE_LEVEL') or define('YII_TRACE_LEVEL',3);

require_once($yii);
Yii::createWebApplication($config)->run();

Explanation:

In the directory:

yii/
	1.1.8/

we move the core in the folder 1.1.8 (based on the version of the Framework), so in this way, we can upgrade the Yii Framework without hurting the operation.

In our WebApp folder:

webapp/
	1.0/

This way, we are working based on the version of the WebApp, we now rename the folder 'protected' to 'webapp', and then create a folder based on the version of the webapp, in the example is '1.0' ( in this folder, we put all the subfolders we have 'models, controllers etc..').