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Title
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Front-end developer's guide
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Tutorials
Yii version
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front-end, views, layouts, chtml, CClientScript
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[...]
This wiki is targeted at developers that are new to Yii and are focusing on developing the front-end of a Yii application using languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Perhaps there are different developers working on the backend, but you are focused on the front-end. There are certain things you need to do to keep your code manageable for those backend developers. This article is meant to teach you those things.
Views
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As a front-end developer, you will be focusing mainly on implementing views. Views are simply *.php files that contain mostly html which is sent to the browser. They may be embedded in layouts, which is very similar to a view itself. Layouts generally define the outside framework of a website, while the views define the content on the individual pages. View are contained in the `protected/views` directory, and are organized by `controller` (`controllers` are like categories that views with similar purposes reside - for instance a blog post list and blog post create view may be in a `blog` controller). Layouts are contained in the `protected/view
s/layouts` directory. Layouts may even be embedded in other layouts.
For instance, the `view` file for the front page is likely at `/protected/views/site/index.php`, as the front page is the `index` action in the `site` controller by default.
You can use the CHtml helper to render certain html elements. This should especially be done for links and forms. Please [read this](http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/48/by-example-chtml "CHtml examples") for code examples of CHtml.[...]