While developing a site using the Yii framework there are a couple of extensions that are must haves. These extensions will make your life easier and you won’t have to write your own code.

• Edatatables – this extension allows you to create datatables using http://datatables.net/ jquery framework. It’s a wrapper around that framework and allows you to get datatables up and running fast. It also is very extensible allowing you to modify the source as needed.
• minScript – min script is an extension that allows you to minify all of your assets through a one line change in the config.
• recaptcha – allows you to put a captcha to prevent bots from spamming your site. This works great and is only a couple of lines to setup also.
• restfulyii – this extensions allows you to easily create an API with authentication. You can name your routes whatever you want and have specific methods that get called.
• yii-environment – this extensions will allow you to have environments setup for each phase of the development cycle. For example you have a development, test, staging and production environment. This allows you to set config params for each like database drivers or other environmental variables.

By using these extensions you will save yourself time and probably end up with more updates coming through than if you had built them yourself. It’s important when using any framework weather it be Rails or Yii that you use the extensions available even if they don’t do 100% what you want them to do. You can always modify the source in Yii and in Rails you can always open the class up and change whatever you need to change.