Learning Kohana

Since the community of Kohana is growing and the number of contributions and posts also grows. Like I’ve done in the past I’ll list these welcome additions. The change this time is that I’ll list stuff from both the forums and other sources as the division between them is sometimes hard to make.

First of all, a nice comparison of CodeIgniter and Kohana. It’s not nice because the conclusion is that Kohana is very good but because it’s not a comparison limited to checking off features and making a nice table out of it. Instead, focus is on 5 things (Stability, File layout, Methodology, Features and Community)

Here you can find a tutorial on integrating the tinybutstrong template engine into Kohana.

Another comparison of all the big php frameworks, it’s brief but to the point. If you share the same ideology regarding frameworks it will certainly help you. This post on mindware.ro shares that mindset.

I’ve covered benchmarks before and here is another one. The conclusion that eAccelerator isn’t too keen on php5’s auto loader functions is probably a very valid one. A problem easily tackled though by creating a loader class which loads libraries before you instantiate them (and does not instantiate them into the current object). I’m curious to see performance with such a library in place. Also something I’d like to see in future benchmarks is the loading of the database library together with a simple select query. A high percentage of framework pages will probably use that kind of stuff.

On the front of code contributions this one is certainly quite nice. You pass an image in the path together with width and height and you get a resized version in return. Great stuff for a photo library although I’m not sure caching is in place which is probably advisable for high traffic sites.

Something I have not covered yet but could certainly be useful for (big) sites is the Kohana Queue module It allows you to queue task, give priority to tasks etc. Handy if some of your code can’t be run in a simple browser session since it has to wait or takes a long time. Zombor, a Kohana dev, made it.

A quick google code project search will reveal quite some projects use Kohana. This one covers a head library for example. There are several others but I’d like to highlight Kodem which says ‘The Goal is to provide a module that demonstrates what Kohana is capable of, and at the same time provide “best practice” code examples for users of Kohana.’ Developed by Oscar Bajner.

Another project I’d like to highlight is s7ncms which seems right now the most mature cms made in Kohana. Worth checking out.

The comparison of frameworks is not restricted to everywhere else on the internet except for the Kohana site itself. The community is in fact doing its best to improve Kohana. This initiative for example to make the kohanaphp.com website clearer for new users.

Of course Kohana is not restricted to the English language alone (it has utf8 support), maybe some other time I’ll list pages not written in English. Problem is I will only be able to fully comprehend Dutch, French and German stuff (besides the English), Spanish and Italian I might guess around for a bit but anything else I wouldn’t have a clue of what’s being said.