Customizing/extending CGridView widget YII

Question

I'm pretty familiar with the CGridView filter and it's a very customizable stuff. But the life isn't perfect and I need to change the, almost completley the layout of the cgridview. (the features will be the same [filtering,sorting]).

So how should I start this "customisation", how can I extend the look of the CGridView?

FYI I need something like this

Answer 1

It's easy if you open up the class of CGridView you will see on line 449:

public function renderItems()
{
    if($this->dataProvider->getItemCount()>0 || $this->showTableOnEmpty)
    {
        echo "<table class=\"{$this->itemsCssClass}\">\n";
        $this->renderTableHeader();
        ob_start();
        $this->renderTableBody();
        $body=ob_get_clean();
        $this->renderTableFooter();
        echo $body; // TFOOT must appear before TBODY according to the standard.
        echo "</table>";
    }
    else
        $this->renderEmptyText();
}

you basically need to extend the class, put it in a folder that you can access it in extensions, and override methods in this function