Using clips

One of the Yii features you can use in your views is clips . The basic idea is that you can record some output and then reuse it later in a view. A good example would be defining additional content regions for your layout and filling them elsewhere.

Getting ready

Set up a new application using yiic webapp.

How to do it...

1. For our example, we need to define two regions in our layout: beforeContent and footer. Open protected/views/layouts/main.php and insert the following code line just before the content output (<?php echo $content; ?>):

   <?php if(!empty($this->clips['beforeContent'])) echo $this->clips['beforeContent']?>

   Then, insert the following into <div id="footer">:

   <?php if(!empty($this->clips['footer'])) echo $this->clips['footer']?>

2. That is it! Now, we need to fill these regions somehow. We will use a controller action for the beforeContent region. Open protected/controllers/SiteController.php and add the following code to actionIndex:

   $this...