Learning Kohana

Actually I was planning to do a post like the one you see now for post #50 and have a celebration and a little discussion on what the future will bring. However, Leo’s comment screwed with these plans I first wanted to write a small comment to his comment but it grew and grew and it came to me to dedicate an entry to it and prepone (a word?) post #50 a bit. So, a small warning; this post can be quite lengthy. I suggest you read the comment of Leo first.

I appreciate your comments. I started out this blog on another domain, or rather a hard to remember number starting with h1*.net or something ;). At one point it was decided to move to this subdomain. It is by no means official in the sense that I propagate how people should code, I merely share my solutions to the problems I encounter. I have a good understanding of how Kohana works and would like to help others in my spare time to understand it too.

I realize that over the past month this blog has become a big resource for new Kohana users and indeed I should deal with a more formal or structured approach to offering the tutorials and code snippets etc. On the other hand I don’t want to spend too much time on it. I’ve been thinking about a new skin for WordPress so the articles are more usable. Your suggestions will be kept in mind.

It’s just that I didn’t anticipate the growth of the blog and such issues never crossed my mind. I blog about the issues I come across and use (simplified) versions of the code I use and therefore I show the Formation library or any other code of mine. Articles take up a lot of time to write. For example, I don’t use the template controller but my own layout library for layouts and I have to investigate the code of the template controller for the tutorial. Very time consuming.

For what’s it worth, I use a pretty recent build of Kohana for my applications and therefore the tutorials. I do try to take care of not using any new functionality so basically any recent build (last month or so) will do and for most posts the last build as well. Unless I specifically cover new things such as Validation or Unit Testing.

Also, I try to not get into too much detail. For the blog tutorial I used Formation because it’s easiest for me and what’s happening shouldn’t be too hard for others as it is similar to Forge and is self-explanatory code. Perhaps you’re right that Forge would’ve been clearer but my unfamiliarity with that code and its inner workings kept me from it. Also know that a reasonable level of php-understanding is always anticipated.

There is indeed somewhat of a build up in the posts. I try to minimize it and that’s why I created the categories to group related posts together but also why I’ve done a couple of series. I was planning to create a couple of pages to elaborate on this grouping. Giving more priority to this is certain on the list but time or rather the lack thereof is what’s keeping me. As a note, gathering from the statistics it still seems to me that validation and orm are the most wanted subjects to get more information on.

All in all this blog has grown a bit beyond me, it started out as personal place for me to post the Kohana code I wanted to share with the world together with a tutorial here and there of what I suspected was unclear to the average new Kohana user. The need for those posts was greater than I anticipated And here we are today.

I would very much like some feedback on what Leo and I wrote. There are some other things I also want to give some attention to.

First of all, I very much would like some guest authors or something. Mosts posts I write during the weekend in some lost hour and I set its publishing date somewhere in the week. However, this weekend for example I have found no time to write anything so I’m not sure what this week will have in store for you. Having some other people around helping with posts would be a great help. I do not have expertise in all of Kohana nor do I know what people new to Kohana really need. Help here is needed. Register on this blog and post a comment you want to be an author will be enough.

Second thing is WordPress. I enjoy WordPress but not its skin. It’s just not very suitable for posting code or tutorials in general. If there is someone out there who knows a nice skin suitable for tutorials, widget-ready and preferably has some of the Kohana green in it? Leave a comment! Also, if there is a WordPress plugin to classify posts as ‘beginner’,'advanced’,'guru’ or something, it might be helpful. I’m open to suggestions.

For those who skimmed down to the conclusion of this post: I want some feedback as to the future of this blog. If there’s anything on your mind concerning anything non-code about Kohana, post it here! I will surely read it and take it into consideration.