There are many ways to automate the setting of timestamps in yii ActiveRecord models. Two of them are: Via rules() Via beforeSave() To start off we need to create a database table. CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS ` Nodes ` ( ` id ` bigint ( 20 ) NOT NULL auto_increment , ` title ` varchar ( 255 ) NOT NULL , ` created ` datetime NOT NULL , ` modified ` datetime NOT NULL , PRIMARY KEY ( ` id ` ) ) ; After we have the table we need to create a model and CRUD for it by using Gii. Check the guide on How to generate model and CRUD with Gii . The first way you can do it is via your model's rules. Here is an example. /* * * @return array validation rules for model attributes. */ public function rules ( ) { return array ( array ( ' title ' , ' length ' , ' max ' => 255 ) , array ( ' title, created, modified ' , ' required ' ) , array ( ' modified '