Application templates
Yii2 has two application templates for development: basic and advanced. What is the difference between basic and advanced templates?
The names are confusing. Some people in the end choose basic because advanced may sound repulsive. In this chapter we will look at the differences.
How to do it…
Please refer to the Installing the framework recipe's How to do it… section to understand and learn how to install different templates.
How it works…
The advanced template has a custom system of configurations. It is developed so that a team can work together on a project but each developer can customize their own configurations for development, testing, and other environments.
Configuration environments can be complicated and normally aren't used when you develop alone.
The advanced template has frontend and backend folders for the frontend and backend parts of the web application accordingly. So you can configure a separate host for each folder and thereby isolate the frontend and backend part.
This is a simple way to organize files into directories and configure the web server. You can easily do the same thing in the basic template.
Neither front/back-end separation nor user management is on its own a good reason to choose the advanced template. It's better to adapt these features to your app—you'll learn more and won't get the difficult config problem.
If you will be working on the project with a team and you might need configuration flexibility, use different environments to develop and in this case a better choice would be the advanced application template. If you will be working alone and your project is simple you should choose the basic application template.
