Nine years since first Yii version was released 1.x reached EOL.

We are very pleased to announce the release of Yii PHP Framework version 2.0.3. Version 2.0.3 is a patch release of Yii 2.0 which contains about 50 minor new features and bug fixes.

PHP framework Yii 2.0.2 released. This version is a patch release which contains about 40 minor new features and bug fixes.

What do you mean by large _concept_ application? If you mean large or famous projects in production, Yii 2.0 was just released so there aren't many.

For 1.1 there are some:

https://www.facebook-studio.com/, http://2gis.ru/, http://itop.fm/, https://www.humhub.org/, http://www.x2engine.com/, http://zurmo.org/, https://www.rebilly.com/, http://buildwithcraft.com/

I can persuade you to use any of these two frameworks providing lots of arguments but I prefer not to do so. Try both yourself else you'll be wondering if you've made the right choice while working with one.

The cost for auto-escaping everything is too high:

1. You're no longer using PHP. btw., Yii supports Twig that escapes everything by default. 2. Performancewise it's quite a bit hit.

1. Yeah, that's a valid excuse, but only if your framework is written in PHP. So Yii has an excuse, but Django does not.

2. You'll have to escape virtually all the strings that go into the template anyway. So the peformance hit of escaping is almost the same, assuming you don't re-compile the template every single time (which no sane template system does).

Why?

You've meant "were small in 2008"?