Tools for creating a social network?

Question

PHP

I decided to create my own social network for a small group of users and, of course, primarily for programming practice, but I don’t know which tools to choose.
So here are the odd bits.
1) I chose Yii 2 as a framework, is something else worth it or better?
2) I want to make the site fast, i.e. like VKontakte, so that the pages are not loaded every time, but only part of the page is updated. How is it done? and there is not a change in the DOM, but the link changes and the source code too, but such things as the header, the menu are not updated
3) dialogs. what technologies are used there? pulling the database out of the database with ajax every second is not a very good idea, in my opinion, also with comments

Answer 1

1. YII pain, I advise Laravel, Symphony, etc. In general, if you need speed and dynamic loading, then I advise you to look towards nodejs + express.
2. This is called SPA(single page application), it can be done in different ways.
3. Sockets are used, or long-polling. You can look at socket.io for an example. There's even an example of a chat, ready.

Answer 2

use COMET COMET Ilya Kantor

Answer 3

1) personally I would take Laravel. Big community, lots of articles
2) via ajax I guess
3) look for articles on "long polling" or "long request"