Archetypical I would like to spot out that, using one framework vs. another is generally a interrogative of individual taste and live .Our firm has experience in Zend and in Yii. Zend has commercial support, a large code base and is somewhat sluggish in updates and in performance.Yii on the different assistance is a newer framework with fantabulous documentation and is a lot leaner and as a result quicker.There are different sites which give critique one over the opposite, for monition a fashionable planning place is stackoverflow.com where someone asked this really ruminate: Yii vs. Zend.
There are many other posts which point in a similar direction as well:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741274/experience-using-yii-framework-for-actual-php-project
http://www.sheldmandu.com/php/php-mvc-frameworks/php-mvc-framework-performance-part-1
We have worked with both Yii and Zend in the past, while Zend has been an excellent framework, it has strong commercial ties which increase the cost of application development due to licensed IDE’s, server testing environments and licensed developers. Yii on the other hand has the same features but is completely open in nature and as a result has some very talented people working for it – passionately.
Our personal tests with Yii have led us to realize it is completely reliable under heavy loads (few million pages per month) and has the best user management/role access features in any framework out there. This is of special importance here as we will need multiple roles for the project and Yii will be a natural choice as a result.
Based on the requirement, the reporting tools available in Yii are going to aid in rapid templating and development of the reports which are required for the front and back end. Yii automatically integrates AJAX (jQuery) based lists which will allow on page sorting, searching and PDF or CSV data exports as well.
Yii is a MVC based framework, which means that it allows us to separate the business logic from the views, in case we need to reuse certain components to other pages, the architecture will allow us to do so quite rapidly. Case in point – when we need to create a specific page for tablets or mobile devices, we will need to change views and reuse the previous business logic. Even when we need to implement multi lingual features into the website, we have inbuilt support from the framework which is completely UTF-8 compatible.
Additionally here are some samples of Yii that use it for eCommerce:
http://www.awx.co.za/shop/cat/t/Home.html
http://www.luxpearls.lu/en/index.html
http://littledumpledale.co.uk/

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