As a long time Kohana user, it really does make working with PHP much cleaner and faster. It takes the best architectural aspects of CI and adds some excellent functionality (full OOP, ORM, cascading filesystem, Events, Auth module).

The Kohana framework is actually at a critical turning point. Check http://dev.kohanaphp.com/ for more information. The version 2.x codebase has been optimized in the 2.4 release (cleaned up libraries, enhanced DB library and ORM). The new 3.x codebase was completely rewritten from the ground up by the BDFL and is currently managed on GitHub (http://github.com/kohana). 3.x was just released (http://forum.kohanaphp.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3479) and supports the HMVC design pattern and is shaping up to be an amazing framework. A new website for Kohana for both 2.x and 3.x (aka KO3) is close to being released along with complete docs for 3.x.

For those interested in a quick preview of the code: KO3 API (http://www.kerkness.ca/ko3/index.php/guide/api) KO3 User Guide - Work In Progress (http://www.kerkness.ca/ko3/index.php/guide)

Thanks for the info.

How stable is Kohana? I'm building a project with PHP/CI right now, because I need something boring and stable that's cross-platform and easily installed by enterprise users (when I'm hosting I'd rather use RuPy).

Edit: That's considering it's just undergone a major transformation; I mean more in general and with regard to future direction.

The 2.4 version that is due to be released shortly is an updated version of the 2.3 branch which is stable. The 3.x is a complete rewrite is likely to be less stable. I haven't used 3.x for a project yet, but it does look interesting.

Here is a good discussion on the subject: http://forum.kohanaphp.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3477...

I think some balanced discussion about Kohana v. CodeIgniter would be helpful on HN.

I haven't followed the debate, but I do find it interesting that the Kohana article on Wikipedia is being evaluated for possible deletion because all (nearly all?) contributors to its K v. CI debate are "developers of K" according to the WP discussion page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

The comparison between the frameworks was more relevant at the initial fork, when Kohana was simply a PHP5 port of CI with a additional functionality. However, at this point in time, the code bases have diverged to the point where no more CI code currently exists in Kohana. Some of the underlying architectural concepts are still shared between CI and Kohana 2.x, but Kohana 3.x has diverged even further.

What actual information does this provide? A beautiful UI is orthogonal to the web framework in use. Let's see some code.

That really wasn't the purpose of the article. I was trying to raise the awareness and interest in Kohana by showcasing some websites that are built in Kohana.

When I first mention that I use Kohana or am going to use Kohana on a project, the first question is usually do you have any examples of sites built with it? So I was answering that question by blog post that hopefully others would find useful too.

To my knowledge, heartbeatapp.com is very VERY comprehensive.

Kohana looks promising, never heard of it before.

From Wikipedia: "The principal reason for the fork was to create a more community-based web application framework as many users were frustrated with CodeIgniter's lack of bug fixes and inclusion of new features requested by the community."

The best things about Kohana is its simplicity. If you've done any framework/mvc building/modding/learning before you're going to be able to understand exactly how Kohana works with just a little bit of effort.

In practice, this means two things to me:

1. Whenever I'm in doubt, I can easily go to the code. I don't live or die based on documentation. Everything from the front controller to the templating library is accessible to any skilled developer.

2. It doesn't have to be a ginormous "all things to all people" framework like Zend or Cake or Symfony. (Those are great frameworks, I'm not knocking them). It can stay smaller because if there's any functionality I need that isn't there I can write it in without much work. And this is very idiomatic in Kohana. The framework encourages you to extend and overload.

Kohana is a very nice project when you are forced to use PHP to develop a webapp, it's quite simple to use and fast.

The community forums are active and friendly, the only lack I saw (some time ago) was the documentation, but the code is very clean and well documented with concise and clean comments.

I used it right before my complete switch to RoR, I was happy with it, but php is still the big poorly designed language-mess which has always been.

...though Kohana 'suggests' some good practices, it doesn't force anything. So its still possible to work on a project where a lot of the 'wtf' php allows to happen still come up, albeit just inside a more sensible way of organizing things. The good intentions of your fellow developer still dictate the wtfs-per-minute..

This is not a issue isolated to Kohana and PHP, its affects all languages and frameworks.

Yay for Kohana on Hacker News!

I personally like FlourishLib - simple, no-brainer, doesn't come into your coding style. The programmer of that framework does excellent support as all.

Indeed, Will does a great job and is very passionate. Have met him on a couple of occasions.

Having said that, Flourish isn't (and isn't trying to be) a framework like CI or Kohana.