I've built a few apps with Yii2, the largest project handling about 500k monthly visitors with database heavy operations. It's great, fast, and relatively light-weight.

ActiveRecord is extremely useful in parameterizing queries, reusing them, and configuring multiple databases. Setting up caching is pretty easy and customizable. URL routing, easy. Debug toolbar is helpful. Testing with codecept is a bit complex but it exists. REST API URL rules for controllers to easily handle POST/GET/PUT, etc. Decent amount of helper methods - URL generation, form validation / generation, etc. Console support for command line / cron tasks works well.

The only thing I wish it had native support for was worker methods and easy plugin to one of the popular messaging queues. And to that point there are some solid community built plugins that fill in the gaps of most of the framework's shortcomings.

To be fair - the only other framework I've used is CodeIgniter a while back, but I've rarely found myself thinking "wow this framework is no good anymore I need to find a better one"...like I did with CI

Ultimately - I like it because it is a GREAT MVP building tool from backend to frontend. And with CRUD code generation you can build forms and tables so fast. If I ever hit the point where Yii2 doesn't work at scale - it has served its purpose.

I used the first version and it was a delight. Installation is an easy task, its Active Record ORM makes querying the db a breeze, it's very secure and anything you do takes a fraction of the time it would take to develop with core PHP.

If you're using PHP looking for a framework be sure to checkout Laravel.

Very Happy with it.

Laravel.com Great Docs

Laracasts.com Great tutorials.

forge.laravel.com makes server setup and deployment super easy.

Laravel Valet creates a rock solid super light local dev env. (mac only)

Great community.