Christian Montoya

Blueprint in the Yii PHP Framework

I just found out about the Yii PHP Framework via a good friend of mine, and was surprised to know that it includes the Blueprint CSS framework in its templates (and therefore, my friend is now working with Blueprint). My only nitpick is that Yii is using Blueprint 0.9, and ought to update to the vastly better version 1.0, which can be found on the download page. But this is great news! It follows from my previous post, Blueprint 1.0 and Blueprint in Joomla 1.6, in which I discussed my long-running goal of seeing Blueprint used in other tools and frameworks, helping to make making websites, easier. 

As community lead for the project, I try to manage the information front as best as I can (think of it as marketing… marketing the framework is my job). Sure, contributing code to the core is important, and I do a lot of that, but helping people discover the framework, and convincing them to use it… that’s the kind of work that I consider a must. Before I took over the project, it didn’t have a homepage; there was a repository on Google code and a blog with a handful of posts, as well as a mailing list, but things like tutorials and resources were hard to find. And when the project went dormant, as the sole manager of it was out of commission for a long time, there was no way to manage it in his absence. When I finally managed to get a hold of him, I made sure to clean up the old websites that referred to the framework, give access to more than one person in each case, and build a website that could be a one-stop “home” for everything Blueprint. Now I hope to get the word out to everyone about version 1.0, as it provides a lot of fixes and improvements over previous versions, and is what I consider to be a “long term stable” release. If anyone is going to package Blueprint with a bigger project, they should package 1.0. That’s a fact. 

Anyway, I won’t bore people too much with details about the project… I’ll just share something that brightened my day, from the Facebook page for Blueprint: 

it was on aug 9 2007 when the first link about blueprint went into my del.icio.us (article by Khoi Vinh about grid layouts) and now I see the tag “v1.0” in your repository. VERY EXCITING NEWS, really. I hope to use the beautiful, superb, stunning blueprintcss soon again… Thank you, keep up the great work!

And here’s a few sites I discovered recently that are using some or all of Blueprint: 

• Stay.com (built with Yii)
• Mint.com
• Dailymotion (you read that right!)

Having a little project that I took some part in being used on major websites like these… well, it’s pretty cool.