Learning Kohana

As some of you may know, Kohana 2.2 is coming 08-08-08. In this last week everything is being wrapped up, last bugs squashed etc. Despite the awesomeness of the Kohana developers they really can’t do everything. There are only so many hours in a day. Especially the documentation needs updating for the 2.2 release.

On the forums, nodren began a ‘Documentation Sprint’ initiative to further the writing of the documentation. Many other OSS projects have sprints as a joint effort to improve parts of the project. I’m all up for it and I hope I’m not alone. The docs are in a wiki so everyone can help!

Three big weaknesses in the documentation I’m aware of are

• ORM2 - Well, hardly documented
• Validation - Covers the old validation library
• Moving Log and Config methods to Kohana.php

You can compare the documentation with the API to see further lapses.

If you’re interested in helping out, leave a message in the forum thread so we can work out the details.

There’s been quite a bit of complaining regarding the documentation. It certainly is outdated especially with the Kohana 2.2 release coming up. Anyway, I hear an effort is coming to improve it, so it’ll be better. Keep in mind that you can join in on improving the documentation since it’s a wiki.

As the title suggests this post will cover API documentation. Some of you may know the excellent Kodoc module. Using PHP’s reflection API it is a module to generate API documentation out of your code. If you have properly commented code you’ll see it reflected in the generated documentation. Enabling kodoc is done by enabling the module in application/config.php $config['modules'] array. Uncomment the ‘kodoc’ line. Now you can visit example.com/kodoc to see the documentation.

To help in improving Kohana documentation I took it upon myself to make the API documentation available on the net. The latest release 2.1.3 is available here. These are all static files and won’t be updated (wget ftw). The plan is to host all releases onwards like this.

The latest trunk is available here. I intend to update that regularly especially given the big changes in the API of late. If it’s not updated for a while just bug me about it and I’ll give subversion a kick

If there’s a demand for it and the module is properly documented I’ll enable it.

I also updated the looks a little and use the new jQuery UI library for the accordion effect. I hope this will help you all with Kohana.

In work I use Kohana with Subversion and Eclipse and I love it. I’m not saying its the best development environment but it really does suit my needs as a few of us can work on the same project together without breaking each others code. Plus I also enjoy IDE features such as refactoring, code completion, etc.

I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of why you should also use this setup but for anyone whose interested this is how to setup this development environment.

Getting Eclipse

Get Eclipse! This was originally a java only IDE but over the years has included support for other languages such as PHP and even Ruby. Once installed we have to set it up for PHP development. Open Eclipse and go to help > Software Updates > Find and install. Choose “Search for new features to Install”, add a new site, call it “PDT” (i.e. PHP Development Tools) and address is http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/. Follow the install instructions, its pretty straight forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody has to start some where so why not here. I love Kohana but I was frustrated to get started with it. I wanted to know what the best practice was to set up a kohana project and after some time in the forums I got the answers I needed, so here’s what I found.

Download

Firstly download either the stable release or the latest from SVN. If your going to be creating your own subversion repository for your Kohana project and your downloading the latest build from SVN then I suggest you use “export” instead of the “checkout” svn command as it retrieves everything but doesn’t include any of the Kohana .svn files.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is post number 75 and I’m quite proud to have reached this number. It can at times be quite hard to find the time for a new post, or even a topic for that matter. Nevertheless, thanks to the feedback I’m getting, I get quite a bit of inspiration and there are quite a few drafts in the pipeline. Thanks!

Despite all that I’ve written on Kohana, the framework still has secrets for me. I am yet to touch the Calendar library or the Auth module. There are other libraries, helpers and modules that I hardly, if ever, use. Not because they’re not any good, just because I don’t need them. As a result I can’t blog about them with the level of expertise I post about other things, even though these libraries also deserve this blog’s attention.

So, if you think you’re knowledgable on a subject this blog should cover and you feel you can write a post about it, please register and leave a comment, so you can share your knowledge with the rest of the world. This applies to any topic relating to Kohana; libraries, best practices, production code examples, anything that will benefit the Kohana community.

Anyway, thanks for all the comments in the last 74 posts. Right now there have been over 300, (over 700 including spam). Thanks again. On to the 100 posts.