Yii is an easy, efficient and extensible programming framework for developing Web applications. The first and foremost thing you need to do before using Yii framework is the access to a Web server with PHP installed but please not that Yii framework requires PHP5.1 and above. Some of the things in Yii framework are almost similar to Cake php while the others are totally different. Yii seems to be better alternative to cake PHP because of many reasons. As if you remember Zend was the first PHP framework used and Yii is quite similar to it in many ways.

Now the question comes how to configure Yii framework.

Firstly install your WAMP with the default installation.

Once you have installed this, you should be ready to setup your computer local environment to use Yiic from Yii framework. Firstly, go to your environment variables located at Control Panel->System->Advance->Environment Variables->Path as shown below, Once you reached the path textbox, entered the following location to tell your windows that they are the environment variables.

1.C:\wamp\www\yii\framework

2.C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0

The folder shows the current version my WAMP is using. This might differ. Hence, change the directory path according to the php version you use. Now you have to add the following PATHs in Windows: "C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.8" and "C:\wamp\www\framework". The former path should lead where your php.exe resides and the latter where your yiic.bat resides.

After entering the paths, type cmd in your start menus search field, and go to the web root. You may have to restart the computer if this does not work for you so that Windows can register the new variables.

Yiic webapp mywebsite

And finally will generate a Yii skeleton for your web application inside the directory "mywebsite" in your WAMP web root folder.
For Windows 7, press the Win key and type "env". You should see a control panel section with a shortcut to "Edit the system environment variables". Select it and then click on "Environment Variables...".
Click on the variable called PATH and click "Edit.”. Do not delete the paths already there! Separate each path with semicolons.
And after that same method you need to follow like it was mentioned above.

Yii can accelerate the development process and significantly enables maximum reusability in Web programming. The name Yii (pronounced as [i:]) stands for easy, efficient and extensible. Yii is easy to learn and use. In Yii you no need to learn new configuration or templates language you only need to know PHP and Object-Oriented programming. Yii is extremely fast. It is one of the most efficient PHP frameworks around. Yii is highly reusable and extensible and it is overhead to applications written on top o it is negligible. As a matter of fact Yii is a self- contained component which can be configured, reused or extended easily.

Yii has detailed documentation and nearly every feature needed by Web 2.0 application development. Yii comes with a rich set of features. From the definitive guide to class reference, Yii has all the information you need to quickly know and master on it. Yii is carefully designed from the beginning to be suited for serious Web application development and one more positive feature of Yii is that Yii is free.